The Captain's Secret
by OhMally
Summary: During his first posting as a Starfleet captain, Gabriel Lorca encounters an unknown species. His decision to aid them at any cost will make or break his career, and possibly everything else in his life. - Story begins pre-Buran, covers the events of the Buran, and then continues on into Discovery.
1. Objects in Motion

A/N: This little plot bunny has been following me for a few weeks so I had to pursue it. The story is set pre-Discovery. Owing to lack of information available at present, I've taken the liberty of naming Lorca's previous ship the USS Triton.

* * *

The banal nothingness of interstellar travel was anathema to Gabriel Lorca, because as fast as they were moving, he hated sitting still.

As the Triton hurtled through the cosmos towards its latest transport assignment, Lorca wandered the bridge and did everything he did to avoid sitting in the one seat most officers spent their careers hoping to attain: the captain's chair.

It wasn't that Lorca had any aversion to actual specifics of the chair, and certainly he had longed for it as much as anyone, but now that he had it, he found it irksome. It was comfortable enough, but Lorca hated sitting as a general rule, and so instead he paced the bridge with a padd in hand, wandering past the various command stations and idly glancing at console displays as he did.

Arzo, his science officer, referred to this behavior as "hovering." Lorca liked Arzo. The Tiburonian was abruptly honest and unflappable, a good foil for Lorca's aloof confidence. "You are making the crew nervous," Arzo had said during their first week together. "The constant hovering over shoulders… do you not trust the competency of the crew?"

"Have you ever thought how hard it is to sit in the captain's chair and do nothing but waggle your fingers for hours on end?" Lorca had replied. This was not, of course, an accurate summation of the role of captain, but it did describe how sitting the chair made Lorca feel.

Arzo had harrumphed and fixed Lorca with a look that suggested sitting still in a chair was not something Arzo found to be particularly difficult. Even now, seven months after the conversation, recalling that look still made Lorca smile.

As usual, Lorca found himself up by the viewscreen, one of the few places he could stand on the bridge without making anyone feel like he was hovering over their shoulder. He read over crew requests as streaks of starlight tantalized the edges of his view. To think that each of those streaks had a story, and that he, as captain, might detour and discover any of those stories as he willed…

"Captain, I'm picking up a transmission." Kerrigan was the communications officer on duty, a decent but uninteresting man who liked to talk a lot but usually said very little. "Broadcasting on all bands, audio and visual. Unknown language."

"Origin?"

"A Dartaran ship," supplied Arzo. "Far edge of our sensor range. Small."

The Dartarans were a notoriously private species in the region who occupied an array of moons and planets in the cluster of systems they claimed for themselves. They were not averse to the Federation or anyone else, they just preferred not to be involved in outside affairs.

"Adjust course to intercept and put it onscreen."

The starry streaks disappeared and Lorca found himself standing directly in front of an enormous green eye as an endless streak of wet, lilting syllables assaulted his ears.

"—lalilalulhallilinnlalanalenilalalanelamelimanlalunilalemilanalalennilaminulalalaililana—"

Lorca took a half-step back. The words, if they were that, belongs to an alien with soft grey skin, pale grayish blue fur, and a pair of almost perfectly round enormous green eyes the color of fresh spring grass with dark slits evenly spaced around. Standing in front of the screen as he was, Lorca could make out the flecks and strands of striations in the creature's giant irises and see the lights of the Dartaran ship's console reflected on the broad, glassy surface of its lenses. The alien's tongue fluttered like a small grey moth just inside its mouth. The neckline of some sort of fluffy white garment was visible.

"—lemalunilalamelanalilianilililialemalal—"

Whatever it was, it clearly wasn't Dartaran. "Translation?" said Lorca.

"Coming online now," promised Kerrigan.

"—lalimilalilunilalamanilamili—me! Help me, please! Is there anyone there? Please, can anyone hear me? Help me! Hello, can someone please help me?"

The transition from nonsense sounds to abject desperation was abrupt enough that the helmsman just behind Lorca startled in her seat. The universal translator rendered the voice as high and gentle, almost childlike, and feminine in tone, but that didn't mean anything. The pleas continued without pause, an endless stream of begging directed at no one and anyone with very little variation in theme. "If there's someone out there, anyone, please, I need help. Please. Can anyone hear me? Please, help me, please…"

Between the clear distress, the unknown language, and the unfamiliar species, it was a veritable siren song for any Starfleet captain, and Lorca was not averse to its tune. "Arzo?"

"A personal transport vessel. I detect no structural issues. I am attempting to search for any matches to species in our database."

"How certain can we be of the translation?"

Kerrigan bristled. "Extremely. The base elements and structure of the language don't match anything on file so I had to initiate a new matrix from scratch, but the alien is alternating in matching phrases of Dartaran, Romulan, and even English. The vocabulary is limited, but accurate."

That any of those la-la-la syllables could have been an attempt at speaking English bordered on ludicrous, but both Kerrigan and the computer seemed to think it true. "Open a channel."

"–if there's anyone out there, please, I'm in need of–"

A beeping noise drew the alien's attention and it stopped speaking and looked around.

"Hello? Is someone there?"

"This is Captain Gabriel Lorca of the Federation starship—"

The alien did not hear him. "Hello? Can you hear me? Is someone there? Hello? Hello?"

"Trying again, sir," said Kerrigan quickly, sounding vaguely sheepish. The beep on the other end sounded again. This time the alien started poking around the console and Lorca heard the connection cue.

"Dartaran ship, this is—"

"I see you!" exclaimed the alien, visibly startling. "You're human! Can you see me?"

Lorca remained professionally nonplussed. "Yes we can. This is the USS Triton, responding to your distress call. Please identify yourself."

The alien brought its hands together and began moving them in a repeating circular motion, one over the other, like a fly cleaning its legs. "I'm Lalana!"

It wasn't an easy name. Three softly-voiced but wet syllables verging on two, _lah-lah-nah_ turning almost into _lullna_ , the tongue flicking concavely against the roof of the mouth yet remaining almost stationary. Lorca managed it passably well. "L… Lalana?"

"Yes! Yes, that's right!"

Whoever this alien was, it did not seem to have a firm grasp on proper intership protocol. "I'm Captain Lorca. Can you explain the nature of the problem you're having?"

"Yes, absolutely! I'm trying to escape." What the alien lacked in knowledge, it certainly made up for in enthusiasm.

"Captain! Another vessel coming into sensor range, also Dartaran."

Lalana's hands switched from the circular motion to a rapid knocking together of curled fingers. "That is them! Please, please, don't let them take me back. I beg of you, help me!"

There were too many unknown variables, but Lorca judged the alien's pleas to be sincere. "We're headed towards you already, there's no need for worry. Can you tell me who's chasing you?"

"Margeh and T'rond'n," said Lalana. "They are… hunters. They captured me."

"The pursuit vessel is broadcasting a message," said Kerrigan.

Lorca was forced to make a split-second decision. "Now, Lalana, don't worry. If you need help, we are more than happy to provide it. But I'm going to have to hear what the folk coming after you are saying, all right? Not that I don't believe you—"

"Yes, of course!" interrupted Lalana, utterly devoid of pretext. "To you, I am hardly _ilr_. You must be careful." There it was at last: a word the translator couldn't parse. It was somehow reassuring to Lorca; it suggested this wasn't some form of perfectly-crafted, elaborate ruse. It could still be a ruse of course, but at least it wasn't a perfect one.

"Let's hear it," Lorca said to Kerrigan.

A recording of two Dartarans appeared on the Triton's viewscreen adjacent Lalana's feed. They were brown in color, with orange streaks along the ridges that lined their spiky jawlines.

"Federation starship!" boomed the smaller Dartaran. "We are in pursuit of stolen property. This is an internal Dartaran matter. No assistance is required. Repeat. Federation starship! We are in pursuit…"

Kerrigan looked at Lorca. "Do you want to respond, sir?"

Lorca didn't answer immediately and looked at Lalana. "I assume if we take you aboard the Triton, you have no objection to returning their ship?"

"No, no, but… the ship is not the property they wish for the return of. The property is me."

Lorca had studied up on the Dartarans prior to his posting to the Triton, along with all the other notable players in this region of space. While the Dartarans were not full Federation members, they had associate status and all signs pointed to them becoming members at some point in the future because there were no actual barriers to it. It was just that the Dartarans were slow, cautious, and scrupulous, and had chosen a very slow timeline to pursue.

Which indicated to Lorca that, whatever societal customs the Dartarans had, slavery was not among them. "I didn't think the Dartarans engaged in slavery."

"Oh, no, I am not a slave. I am a…" The universal translator seized up a moment and finally spat out, "pet."

Lorca's fingers tightened on the padd in his hand. It was one thing to answer a distress signal, quite another to wade into a situation of potential diplomatic delicacy.

There was a course required of any Starfleet officer interested in pursuing a command career: Intercultural Ethics. One of the lectures was inspired by an anecdote of Captain Jonathan Archer, Starfleet's first captain, about an off-hand comment made about his dog.

That off-hand comment led to a full two hours of the course devoted to the question of free will and pets. Dogs, while not possessing the same logical, reasoning, and communication abilities as humans, were nevertheless intelligent creatures who had thoughts and feelings and could understand basic commands and communicate their own needs and wants. Yet if a dog ran away, the expectation would be for it to be returned to its owner, regardless of whether the dog wanted to return or not.

What about other primates, and the more intelligent birds? Though protected now, they had long been subjects of abuse and research, often against their will and with little regard for their well-being, and many were also kept as pets. Given their intelligence, did that constitute enslavement? A monkey might learn to operate tools or utilize nonverbal language. Where then was the line as to what level of intelligence might be considered a pet and what should be considered an independent being with a right to self-determination?

What were Dartarans in pursuit of a wayward pet going to feel? Would they see the pet as having a right to choose? Or would they, like the average dog owner, demand the return of the animal, even if it was smart enough to steal a spaceship and hold a conversation? And even if their pet seemed to be a wholly intelligent being, was it right to enforce the ethics of one culture onto another? As humans still kept pets, were they in a position to judge, and did that open them up to be judged as oppressors by another species?

Any of these points might have gone through Lorca's head, but he was only momentarily reminded of the lecture and briefly wondered how badly this might impact Dartaran/Federation diplomacy before deciding it probably wasn't important because of one tiny detail.

Lalana had said they were hunters.

Lorca crossed over to Arzo's station with two long steps. "Show me both ships. Distances, speed, weapons. All of it."

Arzo's display lit up with information from across the bridge: weapons analysis from the security station, course and speed from navigation, plus Arzo's ongoing scans of both vessels looking for anything of note, most recently checking for signs of explosives or spatial anomalies.

They were identical ships, a matched pair of personal transports traveling at almost the exact same speed, except the pursuer was going very slightly faster and would eventually overtake its target in several hours if they continued as they were. If the lead ship stopped, though, it would be caught in a mere seven and a half minutes.

Both ships had shields, but neither had their shields engaged. The Dartarans seemed to have rerouted their shield power to their engines, accounting for the boost in speed, but even so, they were managing only a smidgen above warp three. Weapons consisted of a pair of cutting lasers – designed for asteroids and good at short range, but incapable of doing anything more than tapping on the Triton's shields.

"All right, let's give this a go, then. Lalana, I'm going to ask you to trust me. Can you do that?"

Lalana's head bobbed. "It is within my power to do so. As for whether I will… Yes, I will trust you!"

"Isolate and hail the Dartaran ship. Dartaran vessel, this is Captain Lorca of the Federation starship Triton. We have reached an agreement with the thief of your vessel to return the ship to you, with the one single caveat that the thief requests to be taken into our custody." He said this with great gusto, as if announcing the Dartarans had won a prize.

The Dartaran recording was replaced by a live picture. The larger Dartaran bristled, but it was the smaller who spoke. "Federation captain! This is a Dartaran concern, we have no need for you. The crime was committed in Dartaran space and must be dealt with by Dartaran justice."

"Be that as it may," said Lorca, "the thief has promised to set your vessel to self-destruct unless this one condition is met. So in the interests of you not losing what looks to be a very fine and expensive vessel, why not let us take the lead on this? The Federation would consider it a great token of our esteem for your people if we can get you your ship back, and then we can talk to your Council about having the thief returned to Dartar so you can also get that Dartaran justice you're after."

The Dartarans exchanged a look. The larger spoke in a low, deep voice. "Thank you for your offer, but no."

Lorca had been hoping the Dartarans would fold, but apparently they were going to double-down instead. Fair enough. He crossed his arms and fixed the Dartarans with his most recalcitrant glare. "So you're telling me you'd rather have your ship destroyed than get it back?"

He gave the Dartarans a moment to chew on that. They didn't answer, which was as telling as anything they might have said in reply. Lorca unfolded one of his hands as if making an offer and waved it faintly about to subtly illustrate his points, of which there were three. "Perhaps I'm not making myself clear. I'm not asking what you want to do about your stolen vessel, I'm telling you what's going to happen, and if you have a problem with that, then you can bring it up with the Dartaran Council and have them petition the Federation on your behalf." He ended with his hand closed in a pensive fist.

The Dartarans hissed and growled and terminated communications. Lorca snorted. "Is our channel with Lalana secure?"

"Yes, sir."

Lalana's audio resumed mid-sentence. "—but as much as I am grateful for the assistance and as enjoyable as that was, I do not wish to blow myself up, else what was the point of me escaping in the first—"

"It won't come to that," promised Lorca. "You just hang tight, and everything will be just fine."

"Captain," said Arzo in a sharp tone indicating he had something important.

"Hm," Lalana continued as Lorca moved back to the science station to take a look, "you did request for me to trust you, and I suppose given the circumstance it is only fair for me to allow the opportunity to…"

"Well that can't be right," said Lorca, looking back up at the viewscreen. "How can it?"

"Nevertheless, sir, I am quite certain. Our sensors read no life signs aboard that ship." They looked at Lalana.

"Oh!" exclaimed Lalana. "Oh, no, they wouldn't. You see, my species, we… we do not show up on scanners. That is why it is such an accomplishment to hunt us. If it were easy, our skulls would not be such a spectacular trophy. If is my understanding that we emit an electromagnetic radiation field indistinguishable from the background noise of the universe. We look like nothing on technology devices. As the hunters say, optical and sonar only."

Lorca stared. "Did you say skulls?"

"Oh, yes. We are not usually taken alive." Lalana sounded entirely nonplussed about it, as if this statement were something so obvious and self-evident it was the same as saying the stars were shining and space was big and full of them.

Lorca leaned over the science console, gripping it tightly. It looked like a movement of calculated intensity, but in truth he did it to steady himself so his crew wouldn't notice how shocked he was. Not that they would have. The entire bridge seemed to be frozen. The helmsman's mouth was hanging open, and over at the communications panel, Kerrigan was blinking in disbelief. "Are you telling me Dartarans hunt you for your skulls?" asked Lorca in a measured voice.

"Not just Dartarans. I was taken by Dartarans, but any hunter who relishes a challenge might go to Luluan. Gorn, Tremi, human… There is no one species that hunts us. Any do."

Human. The word echoed in Lorca's head. In this day and age, to think that there were humans who would knowingly fire upon a sentient species in the name of sport… Of course, Lorca knew as well as anyone that humans were as fickle, diverse, and morally variable as any other species, but it was still a rather uncomfortable feeling to know that the person you were talking to might view your species as so utterly bereft of decency based on firsthand experience.

"Captain?" said Lalana, and Lorca realized the bridge crew were looking to him for some sort of sign.

It took him a moment to find the words. All the jovial amicability and lightheartedness present when he had been toying with the Dartarans was gone from his voice. "Lalana." Lorca swallowed and took a deep breath. "Would you be able to tell us where _Luluan_ is?"

"I do not think so." Lalana looked downward and away. "I do not know how to get there. I do not even know how to fly this ship. I… just wanted to escape."

Lorca took another deep breath and exhaled it slowly, centering himself. "All right. Let's just get you off that ship and we'll go from there."

* * *

Since they could not pick up Lalana on their sensors — and it was unclear if the transporters could even properly register a pattern given the unknowable biological variables of a living creature that appeared as background radiation — they could not beam Lalana directly over to the Triton. To further complicate things, they would have only seven minutes once Lalana stopped before the Dartarans caught up and potentially interfered with any operations underway, and Lalana had no real navigational control over the vessel beyond making it start and stop.

The easiest solution was to have a pilot beam over and take control of Lalana's vessel, but Lorca rejected the idea outright. "They can detect a transporter," he drawled, "and that opens us up to accusations of piracy, with evidence to back it up. No, we're gonna have to do this the old-fashioned way, with a docking procedure. Carver?"

Lt. Carver, the helmsman, pursed her lips thoughtfully. "Maneuvering the Triton into position relative such a small vessel will be tricky given our mass and power, but it can be done."

"How fast?"

"Six minutes, maybe."

"I need it done in two. Chief, you said the ship would fit in our shuttle bay?"

The chief engineer, Billingsley, grunted in assent. What she had said was the transport was roughly twice as big as a shuttle, which wasn't even close to saying the same thing from an engineer's point of view. It just happened to be technically correct in this instance. "It's a tight fit. Not impossible, but I wouldn't want to force it in two minutes and damage the bay."

"What if we could give you, say, four minutes? That enough for the kind of precision to make you comfortable?" There was a mild sense of confusion. Why would the chief have four minutes to tractor the ship to the shuttle bay when Carver had been allotted only two?

"Captain?"

Lorca grinned with self-satisfaction. His crew didn't share his smug confidence, but Arzo at least could tell the captain had what was probably a brilliant but needlessly showy and over-complicated plan. In the seven months since Lorca had taken command, Arzo had learned that most of Lorca's plans could be described this way.

Lorca glanced around the room conspiratorially. "Now, docking one ship to another, that's no piece of cake, we'd need at least one of the ships to be stationary. But what if neither ship were stationary?"

"You mean running the tractor beam at speed?" said Billingsley with a mixture of dread and excitement.

"Exactly!" Lorca held up the padd in one hand and plucked the insignia from his uniform with the other. "We match our speed and course — we can do that easily enough — and use the tractor beam to pull the transport in nice and tight towards the shuttle bay." He moved the insignia close to the padd. "Then we decelerate slowly as the transport does."

"Minimizing strain on the tractor," Billingsley observed.

"By the time we're at a dead stop, the ship's pitching distance from the shuttle bay. Won't take more than fifteen seconds to finish bringing it in. Now, the Dartarans–" Lorca put down the insignia and grabbed Arzo's arm, signaling him to make a fist. Arzo begrudgingly complied. Lorca slowly moved the padd towards Arzo's hand. "They've closed the distance as we've decelerated, but we've bought ourselves another sixty, maybe seventy-five seconds to do what needs doing before they arrive."

"That is a hell of a lot of effort and risk for an extra sixty seconds," said the chief engineer, wondering what would possibly make it worthwhile.

Arzo lowered his arm. "Dare I ask what it is you want us to do with this extra time, Captain?"

Lorca smiled. "A lot can happen in sixty seconds."


	2. Game Set Match

A/N: Thank you so much for the kind comments!  
bluestarfish \- My goal is to take the story up to Discovery, so we'll end up with that hardness eventually, but there are a lot of things to happen first along the way!  
SarahELupin \- Credit to Jason Isaacs for being kind enough to talk about Lorca at such length in the press; I've based my rendition of the character on what little we've seen so far and a lot of Isaacs' own commentary and insight.

* * *

Lorca stood in the shuttle bay watching as his grand plan unfold around him. There was something immensely satisfying at imagining something and then watching an entire crew of people scramble around to make it happen just because it was what you willed them to do.

The crew were performing brilliantly. Both of the Triton's shuttles had been moved to the sides of the shuttlebay to make room for the little transport and Billingsley was at the tractor controls with an open comms link to Carver at the helm. "Course and speed matched," Carver reported, right on time.

Truthfully, Lorca didn't have to be in the shuttle bay, but he wanted to see it all firsthand. A case could be made that it was unwise for the captain to be there for this potentially dangerous procedure (and had been), but Lorca had started them along this path, and he was unabashedly curious to see where it would lead. This, he intuited, was as memorable an adventure as might be had on their present assignment from Starfleet.

Billingsley in particular had snapped at him about being needed on the bridge. As she was normally down in the engine room, she was entirely unaccustomed to having the captain watching her every move, and she obviously disliked it. After he had calmly pointed out that he knew where he was needed best on account of being the captain, she had begrudgingly accepted Lorca wasn't going anywhere and told him to stay out of the way. Or more precisely, out of her sight. So Lorca stood off to the side with the security team, watching the back of Billingsley's head and waiting.

The Dartaran transport came into view and the tractor beam engaged, drawing the little vessel towards the Triton. "Five hundred meters," said Billingsley, carefully increasing tractor power. "Four-fifty. Four hundred. Three-fifty. Initiate deceleration."

Lorca heard Carver direct Lalana over the comms. "Now, slow your engines just a tiny amount. Perfect." The tractor emitters thrummed as the speed difference caused a tiny bit of pull on the system. Billingsley let out a rare grin as she watched the stressor level tick up and prepared to compensate. Carver continued, "Now slow down again, just reduce your speed slowly and steadily." The Triton slowed as well, almost imperceptibly, but Lorca could see the lines of stars streaking past the shuttle bay shorten.

"Thirty percent," Billingsley said to Carver. "Forty. Forty-five. Careful, we're spiking! Seventy percent." The Triton almost seemed to shudder into a lower gear, but it had the right effect. "Dropping back down to sixty. Fifty-five. Distance closing to one hundred fifty meters."

They continued this dance, the stolen Dartaran ship slowing, the Triton slowing in response, and Billingsley reeling the smaller vessel in meter by meticulous meter while carefully managing the strain on the tractor beam. The more they slowed, the closer Billingsley could safely draw the Dartaran ship in without worrying about the two vessels colliding.

"Approaching target full stop in ten seconds."

"Seventy meters. Sixty. Fifty. Forty-five."

"Triton full stop in five, four, three, two..."

"Twenty-five meters."

The numbers were largely irrelevant at this point. The stars were stationary pinpricks and Lorca could make out Lalana's face in the ship's forward window. Lalana saw him, too, and waved. Lorca lifted his hand in reply, mildly surprised to see so familiar a gesture. It wasn't an entirely uncommon bit of body language, with analogues in many corners of the known galaxy, but it wasn't universal, either. In at least one known species, waving could be interpreted as a threat.

The shuttle bay forcefield flickered as the nose of the ship pushed through and the vessel came to rest on the bay's surface with minimal audible scratching. Billingsley and her assistants looked very pleased with themselves.

"Dartarans arriving in five minutes and forty-five seconds," reported Carver.

Lalana's face withdrew from the window. Lorca motioned for the security team to take up positions around the door on the vessel's starboard side and positioned himself front and center. While Lalana had obviously met humans before, this was a sort of soft first contact situation, and Lorca intended to treat it with the proper deference, caution, and decorum expected of a Starfleet captain.

The door did not open immediately. Lorca tensed, feelings the seconds tick away. It seemed to be an eternity before the door hissed and slid open, but in reality it was maybe five seconds after Carver announced the Dartarans were now five and a half minutes out.

Lorca found himself staring at empty air and adjusted his gaze downward.

Lalana was half as tall as he had expected, standing a little higher than his hip, and clad in a puffy white and silver jumpsuit that reminded him a little of those old astronaut outfits from humanity's first steps into space, but with feet, hands, and tail sticking out. While the tail had not been visible in their earlier communication, it stretched up past Lalana's head, long and thin for the majority of its length and terminating in a broad, flat, spade shape. It would be fair to describe Lalana as bipedal, but not humanoid. More a mix of bird and lemur, with thin, stilt-like legs.

The most riveting feature remained the eyes, each nearly the size of Lorca's palms and faintly reflecting the surrounding area on their glassy surface.

"If you'll come this way," said Lorca quickly, gesturing towards the waiting hallway. Lalana didn't step down from the doorway so much as extend what suddenly seemed to be an impossibly long leg and glide forward towards Lorca, tail lowering to horizontal as a counterbalance.

Three security officers immediately rushed past Lalana onto the Dartaran vessel to secure it, Billingsley and an assistant on their heels. Lalana's head swiveled to watch as they ran past, but Lorca paid them no attention. Whether or not his plan worked from this point onward, none of it depended on him, so there was no point in worrying over it. "Welcome aboard the Triton."

Lalana's head turned some more, taking in the view of the shuttlebay. "It is very grey. Is it always this grey?"

Lorca stifled an amused snort. "In my experience, yes," he said diplomatically. Lalana's tongue clicked rapidly in response, though that that meant was anyone's guess. "I hope you won't mind, but my doctor would like to examine you before we do anything else."

(This was patently an understatement. Dr. Ek'Ez had contacted Lorca as they were finalizing everything and insisted that Lalana be brought directly to the medical bay for the safety of everyone on the ship.)

"Certainly," agreed Lalana, and they proceeded into the hallway. Two security officers fell into step behind them. "I cannot share my appreciation enough, Captain Lorca. It is ever so kind of you to have me. Even if you've only bought me time, which costs nothing, it's the most valuable gift there is." Lalana's hands began to spin rhythmically as they had on the transmission.

A flicker crossed Lorca's face. The sentiment was perfectly suited to a fortune cookie. "We're just happy to help. Any Starfleet captain would have done the same."

"Then I am very lucky that one found me."

They turned the corner towards the turbolift. "I must admit, you have me at a disadvantage. You've clearly met humans before, but I don't even know what your people are called."

"Lului!" answered Lalana. "We are called Lului. And yes, I have met a human, once. And seen two before that. But only spoken with one on the estate."

Lorca settled for a questioning tactic as a method of engaging Lalana and building rapport. It was an easy choice; from what little he had observed so far, his guest was very comfortable talking. "Is that where you escaped from?"

"Yes. Margeh and T'rond'n's estate. It is sort of a... big hunting ground. They live in a big lalululan. And they had a human guest once named Peter Bhandary." Lorca filed that name away for future reference, but doubted he would remember to look up whatever word it was the translator had just balked at. "I liked him very much. So I was quite pleased to see humans again! Not that I was in a position to have any choice. I would have been just as pleased to see any sort of ship, or to fly directly into a star!"

The cheery enthusiasm at the suggestion was downright comical. Lorca stifled another laugh. "Thank goodness it didn't come to that."

"No. For which I am very grateful. Death is preferable to going back, but life is preferable to death. At least, it is to me."

"I'm sure it is to all living things," agreed Lorca.

Lalana's hands stopped spinning. "That's kind to say, but... It is not true. There was another Lului... Margeh and T'rond'n captured him so they would have a 'breeding pair.' But after they docked his tongue, he bashed his head against the wall until he was no more."

The lift arrived. No one moved.

"I did what I could for him. I did not tell Margeh and T'rond'n until he was very, very dead." Lalana proceeded into the lift.

There was an almost chilling disconnect between the nonchalance with which Lalana relayed this information and the horror she was describing. While her anecdote had successfully cleared up the question of her biology by identifying her as the female of the "breeding pair," it was not a way any of her listeners would have chosen to answer the question.

"Um," managed Lorca, glancing at the security officers. To their credit, they looked just as shocked as he felt. They quickly stepped into the lift. Lorca sensed he was going to regret asking, but he didn't understand why the translator had so confidently used the word "docked" in the given context, and he was already writing an extremely thorough report in his head for Starfleet Command to explain this entire incident. "What do you mean, docked his tongue?"

Lalana brightened. "Oh! That is when they cut off the sides of our tongue." She stuck her tongue out to illustrate. Like her tail, it was long and thin for most of its length and broader at the end, rather like a flat spoon.

To describe that definition of "docked" as archaic was an understatement. Lorca dropped all diplomatic pretense and exclaimed, " _Why?_ "

Lalana began knocking her curled fingers together, again familiar from their earlier conversation, and Lorca realized it was an indication of distress. Her voice seemed to lose its cheerful edge. "In Lalaran's case, because he would not stop screaming."

The look of regret on Lorca's face spoke volumes, but still fell short of fully expressing how much he wished she had not been describing a real thing someone had done to a member of her species. "I'm so sorry."

Lalana's hands stopped knocking and she immediately brightened. "It's okay. It is just a thing that happened. At least Lalaran died in a way of his choosing. To a Lului, that is the most important thing."

"Still," said Lorca, thinking that Lalaran wouldn't have chosen to die in such a manner if he hadn't been hunted, captured, and mutilated into silence.

Lalana seemed to realize her conversation had upset the humans. "There is no need to be sad, it will not change what happened, and today is such a good day. Today I escaped, and today I am free. Because of you, I will be free tomorrow, too."

The lift doors slid open, adding literal light to the figurative light of Lalana's optimism, and they disembarked.

Just then, the communications system beeped for attention and Carver's voice announced, "Two and a half minutes until contact with the Dartarans."

Though the conversation had taken a turn for the better, Lorca was still glad for the distraction. "Chief?"

"Almost there... Annnd... Another second... got it! Everyone off! Jettisoning the transport." There was a whooshing sound from the shuttlebay audio. "Gotta admit, Captain, that was fun, but let's not do it again."

"And here I was thinking we should run this as a weekly drill, see if we can't shave a minute off it," deadpanned Lorca.

"Ha ha," said Billingsley. "Very funny, captain. ... That was a joke, right?"

"If you have to ask, it probably wasn't," said Lorca, voice dripping with feigned warning. "Lorca out." Of course, since Billingsley only had the audio to go by, it probably sounded like a genuine warning, but that suited Lorca just fine. Let Billingsley stew on it a bit.

Lalana's tongue clicked rapidly against the roof of her mouth again and she rocked slightly on her haunches. Something clicked in Lorca's head. "You find that amusing?"

So rapid was the tongue-clicking, Lalana almost couldn't answer. "Yes!" she squeaked, and continued clicking as they walked into sickbay.

Dr. Ek'Ez and his assistant, Dr. Li, were standing on the far side of the room wearing white surgical gowns and holding whole-head biological filtration helmets. "Captain," greeted the doctor.

"Lalana, this is Dr. Ek'Ez."

Ek'Ez was a Kakravite, with four eyes set in a row across his broad face. They blinked in sequence. Ek'Ez put on his helmet and Li copied him. "You should stand back, Captain," warned the doctor. "You don't know what kind of... parasites or bacteria this thing might be bringing aboard. Poisonous fumes. Radiation."

The two security officers stepped back to either side of the door, gripping their phase rifles tightly in alarm. Not that the rifles would do anything to protect them from Ek'Ez's imagined biological threats.

"I don't think there's reason to be so concerned," said Lorca disarmingly. "Lalana's been living with the Dartarans for... some time without any ill effects."

"Two thousand, six hundred and ten sunrises," supplied Lalana.

Even if the days of the world in question were significantly shorter than the Starfleet standard, that still indicated a captivity of at least five years. Another fact to file away for the report. "Exactly, and she's met humans before, and they didn't die."

"At least not as I saw," said Lalana, and clicked her tongue lightly.

Even if Dr. Ek'Ez had known this indicated laughter, he wouldn't have found it very funny.

The comms beeped insistently. "Dartaran ship arriving now!"

"Computer, onscreen," commanded Lorca, and the main viewscreen appeared on the sickbay monitor. Lalana hopped forward for a better view, craning her neck up at the image. Lorca went and stood beside her while Dr. Ek'Ez and Dr. Li huddled across the room, furiously fiddling with their tricorders. "You're gonna miss the show," Lorca warned them, but they didn't answer.

"What does that mean?" asked Lalana.

Lorca shook his head. Apparently the translator was having some trouble in the opposite direction for a change, though with what word exactly, Lorca couldn't tell. "Just watch."

* * *

As they dropped out of warp, Margeh and T'rond'n beheld their stolen transport, the _Pesahr_ , floating in space at a dead stop directly in front of the Triton. The Pesahr was absolutely dwarfed by the Starfleet vessel. If they had held any hope of settling this encounter by force, it was immediately dashed, but neither of them had actually been so naive as to think they ever stood a chance against a Starfleet vessel, and both were in impressed now that they were finally seeing such a large and powerful cruiser up close.

Their awe was drowned out by the beeping of their comm system. "They're hailing us," spat T'rond'n. Margeh opened the channel.

It was the smug human captain again, of course. "Dartaran vessel. We are currently working to dock with your stolen ship as promised. Just be patient and we'll have this whole thing sorted real soon."

"Feh," spat T'rond'n.

Margeh returned the hail. "Federation vessel, we are more than capable of taking it from here ourselves-"

But Captain Lorca wasn't listening to them. He addressed someone unseen. "No, listen, we said we're going to get you off of there, and-"

They heard Lalana's voice over the Triton's feed. "I'm never going back! Never!"

"Captain!" said another voice on the Triton. "I'm reading an energy buildup in the engines!"

Margeh looked down at her console and saw it, too.

"Calm down, Lalana! It's not too late!" yelled Lorca.

The other voice spoke again: "The engines are overloading!"

Lorca's response was immediate and decisive. "Shields up! Reverse thrusters! Brace for impact!"

Again, it wasn't Margeh or T'rond'n that Lorca was talking to, but Margeh quickly raised the shields on their transport as the Triton did the same.

And not a moment too soon. The Pesahr's green engine lights flared to brilliant points of light and then it exploded into a ball of flame, a ring of plasma erupting out into the cosmos. The plasma impacted on the Triton, causing the Starfleet ship's shields to sparkle blue in response, but thankfully missed the Dartarans by a couple dozen meters. Instead, minor bits of debris pelted their ship, fizzling and sparking against their shields.

Captain Lorca stood with his mouth agape. "I hope you're happy!" he shouted at the Dartarans, and the commlink terminated. The Triton's thrusters engaged, turning it away from the carnage, and it warped away.

Margeh and T'rond'n reacted with hisses and howls. "This is their fault for interfering!" Margeh shouted.

T'rond'n let out a final, throaty growl before settling back in his seat. "Keh, At least they don't have the lului."

"Thank D'rannur for that," Margeh hissed.

They stared at the field of debris for a long moment. "What now?" asked T'rond'n.

"I'm thinking," said Margeh.

* * *

Watching it all unfold from sickbay, Lorca's face split into a grin. "Oh my god," he said in appreciation, entirely congratulating himself. "That was downright Shakespearean."

Lalana's tongue was clicking with mirth. She stopped clicking and asked, "What is 'Shakespearean?'"

Lorca considered trying to explain, but somehow felt it would fall short of fully conveying the magnitude of his achievement. "Impressive."

"It was that!" agreed Lalana. "My favorite part was the 'boom.'" She resumed clicking.

"Mine, too," said Lorca, and started to chuckle, too. Lalana, he realized, was funny. _Intentionally_ funny. Normally you were supposed to tread lightly where humor was concerned when dealing with new species because humor was so subjective, and Lorca had so far been holding himself to that, but now that he knew Lalana had been laughing and joking almost from the outset, it only felt right to allow the informality. It wasn't as if he was dealing with a foreign diplomat or dignitary. Lalana was a self-described pet.

Dr. Ek'Ez cut in. "Captain, please, we must initiate biological containment..."

The clicking turned into a short, sharp trill. "Containment?" Lalana echoed.

Realizing what that might sound like to someone who had just escaped five years of imprisonment, Lorca opened his mouth to reassure her it would only be temporary, but didn't manage a single syllable.

Lalana turned grey. Not in the sense that the color drained from her face, though it did, but in the sense that every inch of her that had been blue ‒ skin and fur ‒ suddenly shifted to match the light grey shade of the medical bay's wall and floor paneling.

One of the security officers raised his rifle in response to the perceived threat. The other started to as well, but stopped halfway.

"Well," said Lorca, effectively disarming the security officers with his tone alone. "Impressive."

Lalana relaxed in response to his tone, too, and shifted back into blue with a single word: "Shakespearean."


	3. First Contact

A/N: SarahELupin - Thank you, I really wanted the alien to feel more alien than a human in makeup, Ripper was exactly the sort of thing I was going for!

* * *

There were many wonderful medical devices in sickbay, but after determining that most of them could not properly function due to what Dr. Ek'Ez was calling Lalana's "scattering field," they had been forced to take a manual approach, or as Dr. Li termed it, "give it a flea bath."

It was a ridiculous suggestion, but then, they were facing a ridiculous problem. Lalana was invisible to so many of the sensor systems, the ship's computer didn't even register her as a life form. It could see her visually, hear her voice, and her detect her movements, but aside from the fact she could move, she might as well have been a rock or a piece of furniture.

Her respiratory effect on the environment was negligible. She didn't have a heartbeat. There had to be some form of chemical or electrical metabolic reactions going on inside her, but they were obfuscated by whatever mechanism rendered her invisible to most of the sensors. She didn't even seem to possess a heat signature - she was the same temperature as the room. Ek'Ez briefly suggested she might be a holographic lifeform, but when she sat on top of the diagnostic slab, she had mass and weight, so it seemed highly unlikely she was a biofield full of photons. The concentration of photons required to produce those readings would have been one of those "collapses part of the universe" scenarios.

The precise flea bath Li proposed was, of course, based upon her uncle's service during the maiden voyage of the Enterprise, because Li's great-to-the-nth-degree-uncle had served on the Enterprise and she had a habit of reminding people of this fact any time the opportunity presented itself. "Disinfectant gel and UV light."

"Primitive," said Dr. Ek'Ez, appreciating the novelty of the solution, "but it would adhere to Starfleet regulations. And while I would still advise caution, I would be willing to clear her to interact with the crew when the protocol is finished."

Lorca had the vague sense that Ek'Ez and Li were seeing a glorious medical paper and widespread renown in their near futures. Hell, that might serve his own career well, too. Adding another layer to his reputation besides "effective neutralizer of space pirates" could lead to a lucrative and prestigious posting somewhere down the line.

"We would still need to confirm the protocol's effectiveness. I would need to take tissue samples, and perhaps examine some topical areas optically, with a microscope."

"Sounds like we have a plan, then," said Lorca. "What do you think, Lalana?"

Lalana had listened to all of this with uncharacteristic silence, rotating her hands the whole time, but very slowly. She looked at Lorca with big green eyes and said, "What is 'tissue?'"

"A small body-piece," explained Ek'Ez, which was barely clarification at all.

Lorca's explanation was better. "They want to make a very, tiny little cut and take out a little bit of what's inside you to look at it." He mimed pinching his own arm as example. "You'll barely feel it."

"Oh! Biological sample! Bodily tissue! Yes, I understand. I do not wish to be cut, but if that is what I must suffer through, then I shall."

The universal translator had very little trouble contextually interpreting Lalana's words for everyone else, but when it came to translating technical terms back into her language, it was dealing with a very limited vocabulary set and several things were getting lost. On the bright side, every time Lalana asked for clarification, the translator's vocabulary of her language grew by leaps and bounds.

"We will do our best not to hurt you," said Ek'Ez. "Now disrobe and we will begin. And Captain, if you will allow me to run some quick scans before you go, to make sure there has been no... exposure or contamination..." It had not escaped Ek'Ez's notice that Lorca was leaning against the slab Lalana was sitting on, and had been standing in close proximity to her for over ten minutes now. The fact that Lorca hadn't keeled over from some alien pathogen did little to quiet his professional paranoia.

Lorca felt Ek'Ez was being more than a little overcautious, but he understood the doctor's reservations given the situation. "Of course, doctor."

Ek'Ez went to ready the surgical chamber for UV isolation while Li fetched the disinfectant gel from the medical synthesizer. "I should get back to the bridge, but anything you need, anything at all..."

"Would you mind?" Lalana turned her back towards Lorca. Her garment was held on by a series of small silver fastenings. "I am unable to do this myself."

Normally Lorca wouldn't hesitate to undress a woman, even an alien one, but normally he wasn't doing it in front of an audience of doctors and security personnel. "Maybe Dr. Li..."

Something brushed against Lorca's back and pressed against his arm. Lalana's tail.

"Please?"

Dr. Ek'Ez was fiddling with the UV settings. Li was checking the gel's consistency. Certain neither of them would approve, Lorca reached for the first of the fastenings. It turned out to be a sort of cylindrical clasp, but with an internal catch on it, so after the clasp was released, he still had to unhook the hidden catch within. It appeared the fastenings were designed to be easy to put on and hard to remove.

Ek'Ez spotted him. "Captain," he chided lightly, but without any real force behind it. He had long since given up on getting his way where Lorca was concerned.

Click went the first clasp. "As we say on Earth," said Lorca, not looking up, "'In for a penny, in for a pound.'" Now that he understood the mechanism, the remaining clasps were much easier to release, but still required some determined fiddling.

"What does it mean?" asked Lalana.

"It means a little bit of something is the same as a lot."

"I do not think that saying was said by a medical professional," grumbled Ek'Ez, thinking that a little bit of radiation exposure, for example, was very, very different from a lot.

"You're probably right, doctor. Nevertheless." The last clasp came undone. Lalana shook, the top part of her outfit sloughing off her shoulders, and quickly wriggled completely free of the garment. Any concern he might have had for her modesty was erased: her fur covered her completely.

Absent the jumpsuit, Lalana's legs were revealed to be of a set length, folded twice over, and built for jumping. Apparently the outfit had been designed to prevent this. Coupled with the tricky clasps, it clearly wasn't something Lalana had put on her herself. A ripple washed across her fur from her head down to her feet like wind across a field of wheat, and as she ran her tail across her newly-exposed back, the strands of her fur seemed to wriggle and vibrate. Her hands spun happily together. "Thank you, Captain Lorca!"

"You're welcome. Doctor?"

It took only a minute to scan Lorca and release him. Once he was gone, Ek'Ez and Li exchanged a look. "There's another Earth saying," Li offered. "Dine and dash. Feels like we've been left with the check, doesn't it?" Ek'Ez's inner eyes squeezed with laughter.

"What does that mean?" asked Lalana as Li sealed her up inside the surgical chamber, but received no answer.

* * *

"Commander Benford's in your ready room, sir," said Arzo as Lorca strode onto the bridge.

Lorca had a pretty good feeling what that was about, so he put it aside in favor of getting an update he actually wanted. "Carver, get that course plotted yet?"

"Yes, sir, astrometrics identified the point of origin as the Tederek system."

"Onscreen."

An image appeared of a gas giant circled by no less than seventeen moons. One of the moons was highlighted in gold.

"How close can we get?"

Carver zoomed out to a view of the region with Dartaran space clear marked. "Technically, this is the closest point, but the area isn't heavily patrolled, so we could potentially get closer if we violate the Dartaran border."

"Lieutenant Carver," drawled Lorca, "you read my mind. Have I said yet what an excellent job you're doing today?"

Carver beamed in her seat. "I think you just did, sir."

"That I did. Put us 10km off their border to start and keep us off the lanes. I don't want anyone to know we're out there if we can avoid it."

"Aye, sir."

"Arzo, you have the bridge."

Lorca proceeded into the ready room with his hand at the ready, caught the foam ball Benford tossed in greeting, and promptly tossed it back. "Jack."

"Captain."

Jackson Benford had served alongside Lorca long before the Triton. He was smart, amiable, and had a reputation for fairness. When Lorca had taken the posting to the Triton, his one and only request had been to have Benford assigned with him as his XO. They were a good team. Benford obligingly smoothed over any friction caused by Lorca's sometimes brash style and warned Lorca whenever there was risk of a fire starting. This apparently was going to be one of those times.

"Sarah's not happy. Did you really tell her you were going to make her run tractor drills every week?" Benford tossed the ball again.

Lorca caught it. "It was a joke." Toss.

Catch. "She said you said it wasn't." Benford held the ball up, refusing to throw it back even though Lorca had his hand up and waiting.

Lorca made a face. "Yes, well _Sarah_ should get her head out of her ass. Do you know she said, 'let's not do that again?' Which one of us is in command here."

"From where I'm sitting..." said Benford suggestively, finally tossing the ball back over. "A real piece of work."

"Ah-ha-ha," said Lorca mockingly, unintentionally echoing Billingsley's response earlier. He put the ball down on the table. "But seriously, Billingsley is the most frustrating person I've ever met."

"She feels the same away about you. I think you guys butt heads 'cause you're too much alike. I guess that's why I like you both." Benford had a habit of turning negatives in positives and making the people around him feel good about themselves. Another reason he made a great XO, and someday would doubtless make a great captain.

Lorca snorted with amusement. "I'll get her that new plasma manifold she asked about. But only because you're twisting my arm."

"I'll tell her it's your guilty conscience at work," said Benford, and Lorca didn't doubt it for a second. "But more importantly, I get woken up in the middle of the night and it's brace for impact, and then Arzo tells me you brought an alien onboard?"

From Benford's tone, Lorca guessed that Benford's objection had more to do with being asleep during the action than anything else. "What do you want to know?"

"Everything, Captain. Tell me everything."

* * *

It turned out to be a good exercise for the report Lorca was going to have to make. Benford asked clear, pointed questions that helped Lorca anticipate what his superiors were going to want to know when he let them know about this and made his proposal for how to handle it.

But mostly, it was just entertaining to see Benford's reactions. "Her fur moved? Like, on its own?"

"I swear, Jack, it was like... it was alive."

"Geez. When do I get to meet her?"

"You can go down to sickbay and stare at her right now, but I'd rather not encourage the crew."

Benford laughed and shook his head. "And here I thought I wasn't gonna see the wonderment again."

"The what?"

Benford threw his arms out. He was a highly expressive person, who liked to smile almost as much as people liked seeing him smile. "The wonderment! That look you get on your face."

Lorca took a fortune cookie from the bowl on the table, perturbed. "I wasn't aware I had a look on my face." He offered one to Benford, who declined.

"It's like when we first got onboard the Triton," Benford explained. "You see this beautiful ship, and she's all yours, and you imagine everything you're gonna do with this ship, and your eyes get big, just real big, and that's the wonderment. First week, you walked around this ship, and every thing you saw, I swear! Turbolifts: the wonderment. Weapons lockers: the wonderment. Plasma coils: the wonderment!" With each example, Benford waved his hands through the air in mimicry of a gentle explosion, progressively increasing in scope so that the plasma coils seemed positively nuclear.

Lorca bristled with mild embarrassment. "I'm sure it wasn't like that," he said, but he knew differently. He remembered that feeling as well as Benford did. When they'd first come aboard, it really did feel like anything was possible, but as their assignment had mostly consisted of routine patrol and enforcement, the enthusiasm had waned somewhat over the ensuing months. It wasn't that Lorca had lost any of this spirit. He'd merely settled in to focus on the task at hand rather than getting caught up in all the many possibilities. Now that this had happened, it felt like he was stepping onto the Triton again for the first time.

Lorca broke open his cookie and checked the fortune. _A part of us remains wherever we have been._ He'd seen this fortune dozens if not hundreds of times before and still hadn't decided if it was one of the good ones or not. It was a fortune that could go either way. "Is this 'wonderment' specific to me, or...?" He crunched down on the cookie, enjoying its familiar balance of sweet and dry.

Benford shrugged. "Other people get the wonderment, but not like you get it. Yours is special."

Lorca rolled his eyes. Now he knew Benford was just playing to his ego. "Right, well, all wonderment aside, here's what I'm going to propose to the admiral..."


	4. Fortune Favors the Brave

A/N: We now have the name of Lorca's previous ship! I'm going to stick with Triton for now, for reasons that shall become evident later. I will say I'm tickled pink so much of the episode that just aired was about Lorca and played well with what I've done so far and what I plan to do. You got to see his humor (played up more here in this pre-war period), his confidence and swagger, and that forceful insistence on having things done his way. Plus, didn't Lalana say the most important thing to a Lului is choosing how you die? Guess he took her words to heart. It explains so well the fate of the Buran...

Also, in the interests of clarifying any confusion, "lului" is single and plural, a noun and an adjective, and can be used in the same contexts as the following words (with corresponding variations on articles and capitalization): human, humans, the humans, humanity, Mankind, Canadian, the Canadians. (When your language largely consists of the consonant L, your words end up rather broad by necessity.) Any confusing variability is entirely intentional, because aliens! No matter how it appears, I hope the usage is clear from context, but I won't discount the possibility of going back and standardizing it one way or the down the line. But for now I'm gonna keep playing with it as I have been. Thank you kindly for your indulgence.

* * *

It was hours before Dr. Ek'Ez proclaimed Lalana cleared from medical isolation, giving Captain Lorca plenty of time to prep a first draft of his report for Starfleet, but he still had a lot of questions and blanks to fill in that only Lalana could provide the answers to. When the message finally came through that Lalana was ready to be released, Lorca's order was immediate: "Send her on up."

She arrived in the company of the security officers, chattering away at them. "...the incredible fun it must be to be on a spaceship, especially one as large as this."

"Lalana," Lorca greeted, and to the guards said, "Dismissed."

Lalana crossed into the ready room in two long steps. Seeing her move without the constrictive jumpsuit was a real treat. She had a loping gait that propelled her forward great distances in a single stride, her body balanced perfectly as one foot swept past the other, tail swaying in perfect time behind her. Thought she was now free of the jumpsuit and the full length of her legs had been revealed, she still stood at the same height as before, and Lorca wondered if that was a result of wearing the jumpsuit for a prolonged period, or just her species' natural standing pose.

"I am very pleased to see you again, Captain Lorca!"

"I hope the decontamination procedures weren't too much for you."

She hesitated before answering. "It was... not pleasant, but... I think it is done?"

"As done as can be. I have some questions for you if you're up for it. Have you eaten?"

"Not in a very long time. Dr. Ek'Ez gave me a... protein nutrient bar, which was..."

"God-awful," supplied Lorca, assuming she meant the standard-issue protein survival bars issued as emergency backup rations.

"Yes!" Lalana clicked her tongue in mirth.

The bars in question were made from synthetic protein and designed not for taste or palatability, but to be edible by as many species as possible. The prevailing theory among the ranks was that Starfleet made them taste so bad to prevent people from eating them except in cases of emergency and to cut down on any frivolous use. The byproduct of this brilliant piece of culinary engineering was that some people said they'd sooner eat their uniforms than those bars. A new recipe was said to be in the works, but that it wouldn't be rolled out until the current stocks were depleted, which would take decades at the rate people actually used them. Of course, every good captain and quartermaster managed to lose a few crates of the bars now and again in the interests of reducing the galaxy's stockpile for the greater good.

"Would you like to try a fortune cookie?" Lorca squinted thoughtfully. "Can you eat these? I should ask Ek'Ez."

"Lului can eat most anything. And if I cannot eat it, I will know as soon as I taste it."

"Then have a go."

Lalana hopped forward to the table and stretched up on her legs so her head was as tall as Lorca's chest, one hand gripping the edge of the table for support. Lorca took two cookies from the bowl and handed her one.

"Now what you do is you crack this open, and there's a little bit of paper inside. You don't eat the paper." Lorca demonstrated.

Lalana copied his example and deftly split the cookie in half with one four-fingered hand. Her tongue stretched out and pressed against one half of the cookie for several seconds. Then she withdrew her tongue and rolled it around in her mouth. "I can eat this!" she concluded. She deftly pinched one of the cookie halves between two fingers, then hooked it with her tongue and pulled it towards her mouth. She sucked on it without chewing, because she had no teeth. After a moment it sort of crumbled and dissolved into her mouth, so it seemed to be fine.

Lorca openly stared and watched this occur, unashamed of his blatant curiosity. He held up the fortune from his cookie. "The paper is supposed to be your fortune."

"Fortune?"

"A guess about what'll happen in your future, or a piece of advice." He read his aloud. "'The only good is knowledge and the only evil is ignorance.'"

"Hm, I do not know if I agree with that."

"Well, it's my fortune, not yours," Lorca said with a grin. He didn't particularly agree with it, either. He held his hand out for Lalana's fortune. "And you have... 'Your kindness will lead you to success.' That's a very good one." He handed it back.

"And what do you do with a fortune?"

"Keep it or throw it away, the choice is yours. And the trash can's right over here." Lorca disposed of his alongside the paper fortune from earlier. Lalana examined her bit of paper a moment, then added it to the little pile as well. "Help yourself to another if you like. Now, as our first order of business..."

* * *

Lalana was more than happy to fill in every gap in Lorca's report, and then some, all for the low price of three more fortune cookies.

Her species, she explained, abhorred technology, which clearly classified them as pre-warp, but in a way that meant they were not likely to ever become warp-capable, despite possessing the intelligence for it. Their society was not highly stratified. They lived in communal groups which usually had three leaders, chosen based on age, but the groups were not very rigid, and lului could and did splinter off to form new groups, or merge existing groups, and there was very little formality to any of it. Lului came and went in these groups as they pleased. There was no central government, but in times of great crisis, many lului might come together and work towards a common goal in the interests of the greater good.

One such crisis involved the Lului's first contact with off-worlders. (The word "lului" itself could be contextually interpreted as the species, the people, or their national society in a familial or tribal sense, and the translator and computer formatting Lorca's report seemed to render the word with every combination of articles and capitalization imaginable. Lorca let the computer deal with it as it willed.)

Hundreds of years earlier, a group of either colonists or explorers had landed on Luluan and tried to set up a base, completely oblivious to the presence of an intelligent alien society around them. The Lului, observing the technology of these interlopers, massed and attacked, tearing down structures, destroying tools and weapons, and even going so far as to tear off the aliens' clothing. They didn't kill the off-worlders, but from their perspective at least, the meaning was clear: your technology isn't welcome here.

Of course, the off-worlders missed the message and instead decided their brand new planet was home to vicious native animals in need of eradication.

Thus began an ongoing campaign by the off-worlders to establish a permanent presence on the planet. Each attempt was met with failure. Since lului didn't show up on any sensors, it was impossible to know where they were, or how many, but everywhere the off-worlders landed, the lului emerged from the treetops and the rocks and the forests, bashing all the offending technology to bits.

Various animal control solutions were attempted by the off-worlders to deal with the situation. Mechanized and automated armaments, poisons, mercenary armies, biological agents, wholesale destruction of the environment. Many lului died, but no method was successful against their population as a whole. The lului, being generally highly intelligent, countered every move, and did so without compromising their own morality, which forbade the killing of another living creature for any purpose except eating.

Finally, after dozens of attempts, the off-worlders abandoned their folly.

In their place, the hunters came.

As Lalana later discovered from her time with Margeh and T'rond'n, after the first group of off-worlders had failed, Luluan had been bought by some enterprising traders who realized the planet made a lucrative destination for hunting tourism. They carefully restricted all access, obfuscated records of its location and history, and charged exorbitant fees for the chance to hunt the universe's most exclusive, elusive prey. Luluan became a whispered rumor in the highest echelons of interstellar society, the most exclusive experience money could buy.

The more mythical this rumor became, the more the traders could charge for the opportunity to hunt, and the fewer trips they could make. The economics of it were staggeringly simple.

The traders also claimed that Lului were a rare species to drive up demand. Lalana was certain her people numbered into the tens if not hundreds of millions, spread across every corner of Luluan, but since they excelled at camouflage, they were only rarely actually seen, helping to sell the lie and further build up the mythos of hunting them.

Despite all this exclusivity, Lalana was not the first lului to be captured alive. Over the years, almost three dozen lului had been captured and taken away by various high-paying patrons, and stories occasionally trickled around of what had happened to them. One had been sold to a zoo, mislabeled as some other entity, and perhaps lived there still. Others had become private pets, some conforming to this fate while others killed themselves, and at least one had been eaten alive by a species that preferred to consume their food that way.

Most ended up with tongues docked, because the moment they were captured alive, the traders would suggest docking to their clients "to make the creature more docile." The truth was to keep their ability to speak hidden, of course. While it wasn't always clear how much the clients knew, the traders at least were fully aware they were trafficking in a sentient species. Lalana had escaped this mutilation by feigning an inability to fully speak, restricting herself to small, simple noises to communicate things to the Dartarans and their various guests.

"For six years?" asked Lorca, trying to imagine what it would be like not to have a single real conversation for that length of time. (Based on the astrometrics data for the Tederek moon and Lalana's count of sunrises, the computer had crunched the numbers and calculated Lalana's time with Margeh and T'rond'n to be six years and three months.)

"Yes," confirmed Lalana. "Is that very long to a human?"

Though there were monks that did that sort of thing, it would probably drive the average human insane. Lorca wasn't sure it was the sort of thing he could have managed, and normally he felt like he was capable of anything. "To a human, yes. And to most species I can think of off-hand. Maybe not Vulcans. But continue."

Regarding Lalana's former captors, Margeh and T'rond'n were members of the upper echelons of Dartaran society. They owned a mining corporation, one of Dartar's largest, and controlled several lucrative asteroid mining operations. They were also avid recreational hunters and maintained a large estate upon which they hunted all manner of game, both native and imported. They ticked every demographic box the traders could want in a customer, so the traders had solicited them directly for the lului hunting experience.

But the list of species which Lalana knew to have visited Luluan for hunting expeditions extended far beyond a single pair of Dartarans. Lorca ended up summarizing it as "at least 20 known species plus unknown others, including Gorn, Klingons, K'zinti, Andorians, Eska, Dartarans, and humans." Some of the species Lalana mentioned were completely mysterious-sounding, like the Ferengi, which he imagined to be some sort of walking fungus monsters, especially given that Lalana described them as having hired professional hunters to do the work for them.

"You've seen all these species on your homeworld personally?"

"Yes, and I was lucky it was the Dartarans who caught me. Most hunters do not care about a live capture. Dartarans are more interested in the hunt than the kill. On the estate, Margeh and T'rond'n usually release their catches to be caught again another day."

Lorca grimaced. "But they didn't release you."

"No. If they had, who would believe they had even caught a lului?"

Lalana then explained the mechanics of her escape. After six years of playing the perfect, docile pet, she had earned a degree of freedom around the house. Her "masters" mistook her docility for loyalty and stopped worrying so much about locking her up. They certainly didn't think her capable of operating a spaceship. (Which, to be fair, she had only managed in a very limited capacity.)

Until two days ago, when Margeh and T'rond'n had gone out on one of their regular hunting excursions on their property and left one of the transports unlocked. Lalana waited until they were a good few hours into the hunt, then hopped into the ship and off she went. That, she explained, had been crucial, because it meant that even if they saw her take off in the transport, it would take them at least an hour or two to make it back to the house and pursue.

Lorca was decently impressed by the thought and planning that had gone into Lalana's endeavor. As it happened, she got lucky and the Dartarans did not discover the transport was gone until they returned at the hunt's end, giving her a good 5-hour head start.

Unfortunately, it had not been hard for them to track her, and they had the advantage of understanding how to reroute power to boost the speed of their engines, so what had started as a decent head start had gradually eroded into not much of a lead at all.

It was only after they hailed her and she realized they were gaining that she had started broadcasting loudly out into the nothingness, hoping that someone else would hear her.

The report was well and done at this point. Lorca stretched his arms out and groaned. Even though his ready room was configured for standing, he had been largely standing in one spot working on the report for too many hours now. "I need a walk. I suppose we should get you situated in some quarters, you must be tired."

"Mm, I would like to walk as well. It is ever so lovely to be able to fully move again. If I could, I would leap to the trees with joy, but there are no trees on a spaceship." Her tongue clicked lightly.

Lorca hummed thoughtfully. "We don't have trees, but we do have some plants."

"Human plants? I would very much like to see them!"

"Human and otherwise." Plants weren't human, but Lorca understood what she meant.

Out on the bridge, the shift had changed. Benford was in command and Carver was still at the helm, but everyone else involved in the initial Dartaran incident had cycled out.

"Captain!" Lt. Russo, the senior communications officer. "If I can talk to you... about the... new..." He trailed off when he saw Lalana. Apparently he wasn't prepared for her appearance, and judging by the expressions on the rest of the bridge crew's faces, neither was anyone else.

"Can it wait, Lt. Russo?"

"Uh... Y-Yes, sir."

"And the rest of you, eyes out there, please. You never know who might be watching." It was a gentle reprimand, but a reprimand all the same. The bridge crew sheepishly returned their attentions to their stations.

As Lorca and Lalana stepped into the turbolift, Benford flashed Lorca a knowing smile and winked. Lorca scowled lightly and shot back a "gimme a break" frown in reply. "Deck 8." The doors closed and the turbolift hummed towards its destination. Lorca rocked on his heels thoughtfully. "I had Commander Benford ready some guest quarters for you. I hope you'll find them to your liking. I'll assign an ensign to look after you in the morning." In his mind, he had already preselected Kerrigan, who could work on fleshing out the gaps in the translation matrix while minding Lalana.

"Thank you. That's very kind."

"Believe me, it's the bare minimum we could do," said Lorca, and received several tongue clicks in amused reply.

The turbolift came to a stop and the doors opened. They walked out into the corridor.

Lalana matched her pace to Lorca's perfectly, shortening her gait. Noting it was well short of what she seemed to be capable of, Lorca suggested, "We could also drop by the gym. Then you could really stretch your legs."

Lalana didn't know what a gym was, but true to form, if it was a place to stretch, it sounded good to her. "Yes, please!"

Lorca smiled. "Hell, I'll just show you the whole ship."


	5. Observable Phenomena

A/N: Chapter titles! We now have them. I actually started thinking of chapter titles when writing chapter 3, but held off until I could provide a full set of titles I really liked. Hopefully the references in the titles help people identify and remember where things are. ("First Contact," for example, refers to the proximity of a certain tail...)

* * *

Lalana was thrilled with the hydroponics bay and wanted to touch everything, but not with her hands, with her tongue. Apparently this was a preferred method of interacting with the world for her species. Knowing this put Lalaran's death after having his tongue docked into an even darker context. It wasn't just speech Lalaran had lost in that brutal procedure. Lorca shoved the thought deep down into his mind and tried to ignore it.

Thankfully Lalana was thoroughly distracting. Everything in hydroponics she found to be wonderful, reacting with awe and amazement at the many plants and their uses. Sensing that she could probably spend hours peppering the hydroponics staff with questions, Lorca suggested she come back later and they continued their tour of the ship.

The science lab was wonderful. Astrometrics was wonderful. The galley was wonderful (and filled with curious onlookers Lorca pointedly ignored). Engineering, oh, that was so wonderful, Lalana did a small hop in excitement. There was something very refreshing about someone who saw every inch of a rather unremarkable convoy-level starship as unabashedly awe-inspiring. That's wonderment, thought Lorca, then mentally kicked himself for letting Benford get in his head.

The gymnasium, though, that was something else. As usual, there were a handful of people working out across the room. This included a couple security officers Lalana had seen previously, who did not react with the same level of surprise as everyone else.

Most of the devices weren't usable by someone of Lalana's proportions, but there was one central apparatus that anyone of any size could enjoy, and luckily it wasn't in use.

"...and this is the mat. Go ahead, give it a jump."

Lalana stepped onto the mat tentatively, testing the padding with her foot. She hopped lightly in place. She craned her head up at the ceiling, judging the distance, and studied the mat's dimensions. She backed up into the nearest corner, bounced slightly, and then shot forward.

Two bounding steps propelled her more than halfway across the mat's diagonal, at which point she tucked and rolled. Just before she hit the far corner, she popped out of the roll and backwards into the air with one clean push of her legs, spinning and twisting in the air so she landed roughly in the middle of the mat facing Lorca.

"Whoa!" went an ensign on one of the exercise bikes, and one of the security officers clapped her hands. Lorca followed suit, clapping lightly a few times.

Lalana hopped and spun around, apparently just for the fun of it. Then she looked at the ceiling again.

The gym had a fairly high ceiling. It wasn't as tall as the shuttlebay, but it was the same height as a storage bay, if only for the reason that it was designed to be converted into a storage bay should the need arise.

It was obvious what Lalana was thinking, "Careful, now," warned Lorca.

Lalana backed up into the far corner of the mat with no indication she had actually heard him. She crouched and tensed.

She jumped. She didn't reach the ceiling, but she certainly got closer than anyone else on the ship could have with the gravity turned on, propelling herself a good twelve feet into the air before landing back in the middle of the mat with a bounce that rolled her back onto her tail. It looked like she might have hurt herself and fallen over, but her tongue clicked rapidly as she rolled back and forth on the mat and kicked her legs out into the air, indicating to Lorca at least that all was well.

Finally she popped back onto her feet. "Ah, that was nice! I haven't gotten to leap like that in ages!" Six years, she probably meant. "Thank you, captain."

"You're welcome to the gym any time," said Lorca, omitting the fact it would always be with an escort, because in no universe was he going to let someone the ship's sensors couldn't track by default roam around the Triton unattended.

Last stop was the guest quarters. Two security officers were already posted outside in anticipation of their arrival.

It was a standard guest stateroom, with a bed, desk, small seating area, and bathroom. Lalana immediately rushed over to the window to watch the stars. Lorca joined her.

Lorca loved looking at the stars. No matter how far from home they were, he felt the same looking at them now as he had growing up. It was probably different for Lalana, though. To her, the stars must represent the great distance between her and the world she had been stolen from.

Her hands rotated with contentment at the sight all the same.

They stood at the window watching the stars in silence for several long moments. Finally, Lorca broke the silence. "I'll do what I can to get you home."

She hesitated slightly, her hands squeezing together. "Thank you, Captain Lorca."

He registered her voiceprint with the computer so she could adjust the environmental settings, ran over the basic commands available to control the room's functions, and briefly demonstrated and explained the bathroom facilities. The only thing that tripped her up was the shower.

"You clean yourselves in rain?" said Lalana, staring at the falling water curiously.

"I suppose you use your tongue?"

Lalana clicked her tongue. "Of course not!"

She stepped into the shower, letting the water soak her fur flat against her body. Once she was well and truly drenched, she flicked her tail at Lorca to turn the shower off. She stood in the shower stall, dripping wet and looking for all the world like every other wet, furry living thing: scrawny and unfortunate.

There was a hum as her fur began to writhe and vibrate. The water shimmered and fell away. The humming ceased and she offered the broad end of her tail to Lorca for inspection. It was feather-soft and bone-dry to the touch. "Sonic cleaning," she explained.

"Now that is damn impressive," he said, ranking it above gymnastics.

"Yes, Dr. Ek'Ez was very impressed as well." She stepped out from the shower. Only the pads of her feet had any trace of water. "I wish I had understood better that Dr. Li and Dr. Ek'Ez were looking for harmful microorganisms when I arrived. I could have saved us all a lot of time. I don't have those."

"Is that so?" Lorca stifled a yawn. "Right, I don't know about you, but I'm dog-tired."

"Of course. I am sorry to have taken up so much of your time."

"Nonsense. This sort of thing is the reason I joined Starfleet." They exited the bathroom and Lorca bid her goodnight.

He paused outside the stateroom and turned to the security officers. "No one in or out of this room without my permission, got it?"

"Aye, sir," they answered in unison.

"If she asks, you can take her to the gym or hydroponics. But don't let her near any sensitive systems, and don't let her out of your sight if you do move her."

"Sir."

With that, Lorca strode away. No matter how kind and charming and sweet Lalana seemed, and how true the things she said about herself and her experiences sounded, and how much he liked her and wanted to trust her and take everything she said at face value, he couldn't shake the feeling that there was something she wasn't telling him.

This adventure was either going to make his career or end it.

* * *

As the Triton held its position on the edge of Dartaran space, Lorca paced the bridge like a madman and tried to force himself to sit in the captain's chair with little success. Thirty seconds he managed, and then he was back up on his feet again.

He had submitted his report to Starfleet first thing in the morning and included a brief tactical outline of his intentions moving forward. Now he had to wait for a response. Tactically, he knew his proposal was brilliant, but politically, he wasn't sure if anyone back at headquarters would recognize this or not. While it was true all admirals had once been captains, it was also true that it took a very different mindset to be an admiral, and that not all admirals had been great captains. Lorca fully intended to be regarded as a great captain before they offered him that particular promotion.

Hoping for distraction, he had requested a copy of Dr. Ek'Ez's in-progress report on Lalana, but even that was failing to keep his mind off the abominable torture of waiting for Starfleet's response. He did learn a few key facts, like that Lalana's fur wasn't fur at all. Dr. Ek'Ez had mostly gone with the term "epidermal filament," but there were a few instances in the report where he used "capillary tentacles," and a note in the margins suggested "macroscopic cilia" was also in the running.

In other words, Lalana's "fur" was actually comprised of millions of protrusions of living skin. Technically, she was hairless.

The other thing that jumped out among the medical jargon was the fact that Lalana's natural diet consisted of insects, fruits and plant matter, and dirt. Lorca had done a double-take at that. Apparently Lalana meant it literally when she said her species could eat most anything.

The comms panel flashed. "Incoming transmission from Starfleet headquarters, sir," reported Russo.

"I'll take it in my ready room," said Lorca, practically flying off the bridge.

He had been hoping for Admiral Cantin, or maybe Kariuki. Instead, he got Admiral Wainwright.

Wainwright had a reputation as a hatchet man. He was widely regarded as being the hardest sell where anything was concerned, be it missions, projects, promotions, or decorations. The one thing he rarely turned down were social invitations.

Lorca made sure not to let his dismay show and played up his drawl slightly. "Admiral Wainwright, thank you for taking the time. I take it you've received my proposal."

"We have, Captain Lorca, and I'm hoping to hear that you haven't acted on it yet."

That was not a promising start. "Just waiting on the good word from you, sir."

Wainwright sighed heavily. "Don't hold your breath, captain. We've reviewed your proposal, and we have serious concerns. Your intent to violate sovereign Dartaran space, to start. Then there's this... 'lully' mystery planet, which could be anywhere in the quadrant."

That was not, strictly-speaking, true. Based on the distribution of species Lalana reported seeing on Luluan, Lorca guessed the planet to be somewhere in the direction of Risa, and had included this assessment in his report. He also felt Wainwright was overlooking the fact that if his plan succeeded, they wouldn't need to figure out where Luluan was, they'd be led right to it.

The one thing Lorca hadn't heard yet was a firm no, which meant his plan wasn't completely off the table, so rather than voice the thought that Wainwright was an idiot, Lorca played nice. "Admiral, I completely understand your reservations. I've had them myself. And if I thought this could be done with the permission of the Dartaran council, then I would have asked them already. But if we tip off the people responsible for exploiting the lului, we may not get another chance."

Wainwright was unmoved. "Or you might discover there's a better, more diplomatic, and legal way to proceed. I realize you're new to command, but here at Starfleet, we prefer our captains exhaust diplomatic options before resorting to clandestine operations in someone else's sovereign territory."

Lorca's eyes narrowed. Wainwright's words were belittling in the worst way, implying that Lorca was somehow lacking both in terms of experience as a captain and with regards to Starfleet principles. While he might be new to captain's chair, his principles were solid and true. He wasn't sure the same could be said of Wainwright.

Wainwright continued, "I get it, Captain, you found yourself a new alien, and now you're invested and you want to see this thing through."

As true as that statement probably was, Lorca refused to let his motives be called out so transparently. "Admiral, with all due respect, what I've _found_ is a pre-warp civilization being murdered for profit, which goes against everything Starfleet stands for. All I'm asking for is the information I need to do what any good Starfleet captain would, and while you may not agree with my methods, I assure you, you will agree with my results."

The admiral templed his hands together and looked at Lorca appraisingly. Kid didn't lack for confidence, that much was certain. "If you muck this up, you could jeopardize our entire reputation in that region of space. You risk offending our relations not just with the Dartarans, but with whoever turns out to have jurisdiction over that planet, and whatever powerful friends they have, which according to your report, might include some key figures in any number of governments and organizations."

"Again, with all due respect, sir, but anyone who's friends with criminals like this is someone we probably don't want on our side anyway."

"We don't always have the luxury of choosing our allies, captain."

Lorca put his hands on his hips and waited, watching Wainwright with a critical eye.

The admiral sighed. "I'm not sure you fully appreciate the diplomatic implications-"

Feeling a "no" on the way, Lorca crossed his arms, took a calculated risk, and cut Wainwright off. "Sir, maybe you should meet Lalana. Let her tell you firsthand what they do to her people when they catch them alive. When they do catch them alive, that is. Most of the time they just chop their heads off and keep the skulls."

"Captain-"

"They cut off part of their tongues. When I asked Lalana why anyone would do that, do you know what she said?"

Wainwright glared slightly, but allowed Lorca to continue.

"To keep them from telling anyone what's going on. See, if you don't know they can talk, you can keep pretending they're just animals. Now, to a lului, a tongue is like a hand is to you or I. They don't just use them for talking, they also taste their environment. So guess what the other lului that was captured with Lalana did after they 'docked his tongue?'"

"I did read your report, captain."

"I don't know about you, admiral, but things would have to be pretty bad for me to bash my own brains out against a wall."

Wainwright let out a long, annoyed sigh. He wanted to say no, but he wasn't heartless enough to ignore the grisly anecdote.

Lorca could see Wainwright was wavering and continued pressing. "If it helps, I'd be more than happy to cut all communications with Starfleet and provide you with a bit of plausible deniability if things go south."

Wainwright gave in. "That won't be necessary. I won't sanction what you're doing, but it's your prerogative, captain. You are released from your regular assignment until further notice."

"Thank you, admiral. And, the information I requested?"

Another long sigh. "Transmitting everything we have on Peter Bhandary to you now." The admiral pressed a button on his desk and the data zipped along the transmission to the Triton's computer.

Lorca's smirk was entirely too self-satisfied. "Again, thank you, admiral."

"Has anyone ever told you you're a jackass, Captain Lorca?"

"Only every day of my life, sir."

* * *

As the transmission ended, Admiral Wainwright glanced over at his companion, who had been silently standing to the side during the entire conversation. "You weren't lying, Katrina. He is impressive."

Katrina Cornwell smiled. Lorca had performed every bit as well as she'd hoped, and then some. "I promise you won't regret this."

"Let's hope I don't, for all our sakes. Because if that man screws this up..."

"He won't," said Cornwell, sounding more confident than she actually was.


	6. Out of Bounds

A/N: Sorry for the delay! The first part of this turned out to be harder to work through than I expected, so I had to rewrite it from scratch four times. Luckily, I have a lot of content pre-written, so future installments shouldn't take so long.

* * *

The more Lorca learned about Peter Bhandary, the less he liked the man. Bhandary was, in Lorca's estimation, a veritable parasite whose chief aim seemed to be assisting the galaxy's wealthy and powerful with the acquisition of more wealth and power so that he himself could reap the fringe benefits of their lifestyle. When he wasn't brokering convoluted, lucrative deals to line his own pockets, that was.

Bhandary had first attracted Starfleet's attention when he was contracted by a manufacturer to advise on a labor dispute and his solution contributed to the death of sixteen workers who had been attempting to unionize. Yet rather than this being any sort of professional setback, it instead boosted Bhandary's profile in certain circles because the union had been quelled.

On another occasion, Bhandary had chained together a deal between five disparate parties, but when one of the five reneged, he had found himself in a sticky situation with the other four and leveraged his Federation citizenship to get out of it, tying up Starfleet resources in the process.

The only positive to be found Starfleet's files was the fact that, owing to Bhandary's rather conspicuous activities, there was enough visual and voiceprint data to fabricate a transmission with. (As much as Lorca hated to repeat himself so soon after having just tricked the Dartarans with a faked transmission, it was the quickest, easiest, and most reliable way to get at their real targets.)

But as Lalana provided details of Bhandary's history with the Dartarans to Lorca and Benford in the conference room, the most infuriating thing was that Lorca rather got the impression she _liked_ Bhandary.

Benford sat across the table from Lalana, watching her carefully, while Lorca stood near the window and listened as Lalana enthusiastically recounted how Bhandary had secured mineral converters for the Dartarans by trading a biofuel refinement process to some Rigelians. "He convinced the Rigelians to part with not one but two converters!" she said excitedly, as if this were an amazing accomplishment. "One for each of Margeh and T'rond'ns processing centers."

It wasn't jealousy, Lorca decided, it was disappointment. Over the past two days, Lalana had expressed such an abundance of joy and excitement about being onboard the Triton, it was annoyingly humbling to learn this was simply the level of enthusiasm with which she approached everything in life and not indicative of a particular affection for her rescuers.

"Right, well, I think we have what we need. What do you think, commander?"

Benford was having a blast with their guest. "I dunno, I'd like to hear some more." He had picked up on Lorca's growing annoyance and, as usual, was happily taking the opportunity to enjoy himself at his captain's expense.

"Commander Benford, we just need to craft one plausible communication with the Dartarans, we don't need his entire life story."

"At least let's make sure we know everything that happened during his visit. You never know what Margeh and T'rond'n might ask us!" Benford had also picked up on the relentless one-and-two pattern with which Lalana referred to her former captors.

"Certainly I don't mind telling you everything," said Lalana. "I do want to make sure you have what you need, captain. You never know what you need until it's too late."

As usual, hearing something that might have come out of a fortune cookie placated Lorca on some unconscious level. "Continue," he said, watching the stars. Lalana launched into a brief anecdote T'rond'n had told Bhandary about a Hyrellian mouse infestation in one of the processing plants.

Lorca half-listened while going over the next few planned steps in his head. Sneak onto the Dartaran estate, install the data siphon, intercept their communications, get out of Dartaran space...

Lalana said something that pulled Lorca's attention back into sharp focus and his whipped around. "What?"

"He came to me after Margeh and T'rond'n went to bed. It was very interesting, seeing a human unclothed..."

"Stop."

Lalana obligingly shut up. She looked at Lorca and Benford, seemingly oblivious as to what had made them both so uncomfortable.

Lorca swallowed. "They weren't there, were they? Margeh and T'rond'n."

"No, they had gone to bed. It was just Peter and myself."

"And did you tell Margeh and T'rond'n? Afterwards?"

"Of course not! I was not speaking, if you recall. And I do not think Peter would have wanted them to know. It would have been-"

"If Margeh and T'rond'n didn't know about it, then we don't need to hear about it, either. It won't come up in conversation."

Lalana's hands were rotating contentedly. "Oh, that is an excellent point! Of course they wouldn't know. Very well, in the morning..."

Benford rolled his eyes and shot Lorca a look of relief. Thank goodness that was a bridge they hadn't had to cross. Lorca sent an "I know, right?" look at Benford in reply and turned back to the window, rubbing his temples in exasperation.

Before long, Lalana was done recounting the sum total of her knowledge regarding Bhandary, Margeh, and T'rond'n, and Lorca and Benford began bandying about ideas on what to tell the Dartarans to get them to lower their guard and play along. At some point during this process, Lalana draped herself sideways across her chair so only her back and tail were visible. It was not the most conducive position to engaging in conversation, and Lorca and Benford soon got lost in their own conversational tangent and forgot about her.

"... All right, sounds like we have ourselves a plan."

"I'll have Russo set up the filter and prerender as much audio as he can."

"Make sure he references real kelbonite interference. We want it to look authentic. Have everyone ready to go at 1500 hours."

Benford offered a jaunty salute and exited the conference room.

Lorca looked down at Lalana. Her face was turned towards the floor and her legs dangled off the side of the chair, while her tail curled around her and stuck up at an angle, swaying ever so gently as if touched by some illusory breeze. "Sorry we kept you."

She did not answer.

"Lalana?"

Again, nothing. Lorca leaned over the chair. He tried again, louder. " _Lalana_." Finally he crouched down for a closer look.

It might be some sort of medical emergency, but it seemed like she was sleeping. Her eyes were open because she had no eyelids, but the black dots of her pupils had disappeared, turning her eyes solid green. The effect was unnerving. He wondered if he should try her rouse her physically.

While he pondered this, her tail drifted towards his nose. He closed his eyes instinctively as it brushed up past his forehead and landed on his head on a downstroke. He felt thousands of tiny little tendrils gently weave through his hair to his scalp. It wasn't completely unpleasant, sort of like a squirmy massage, but a very strange sensation all the same.

He cracked one eye open. She was looking at him, pupils back in her eyes.

Lorca roughly brushed her tail away and stood up. "Stop that," he said angrily. "I'm not Peter Bhandary." He spat the name with every ounce of ire he had been biting back.

"I did not think you were," she said, sounding contrite enough to make Lorca feel slightly guilty for snapping at her. "I am sorry. I just miss living hair so much. I know human hair is not alive, but it is attached to something living, so it is much preferable to the hides in Margeh and T'rond'n's house. They were... no comfort. And I know it does nothing for humans, so, I apologize. It was selfish of me."

"Right, well..." Lorca went back to the window and checked his hair in the reflection. It was a little mussed and unkempt. He ran his fingers through the spot to fix it.

Lalana joined him a moment later. "I can fix that for you. I am sorry for the trouble."

"I'll manage." He patted the spot back down and decided it looked decent enough. "What do you mean it 'does nothing for us?'"

"When Peter was talking to me, he was so upset, I tried to _lallen_ him to make him feel better, but... it did not work. He cried."

Lorca's confusion could not be adequately put into words. She had done what? And it made Bhandary cry? He looked at her dubiously. "Are you sure you did it right?"

"Well, of course! But humans only have hair on their head and it isn't alive..."

Humans did not, strictly speaking, only have hair on their heads. Not that Lorca wanted to presume anything about someone else's personal grooming habits. "What _exactly_ did you do with Peter Bhandary?"

"Lallen. Lallen is... you touch someone and your hairs go together. And then, you feel their feeling and they feel yours, because of the way the hair moves. And if someone is feeling bad, you _liliann_ to make them feel better. What do humans do for other humans when they feel bad?"

"Any number of things," said Lorca. "Flowers or chocolate, say something nice, give them a hug."

Lalana quirked her head to the side. "What is a 'hug?'"

It was odd watching something as familiar as a curious turn of the head coupled with a question as basic as defining one of the most innate expressions of human kindness and familiarity. "You sort of put your arms around the other person."

Lalana looked at her hands. "Lului have very short arms so that would not work for us."

"I suppose not. So you... _lallen_ ed him?"

"But it did not work and he went back to bed. I wish lului could cry. Then at least I could have shared that with him. Such a sad man..."

That was the last adjective Lorca had ever expected to hear in a description of Bhandary, but everyone had their foibles. He still didn't see the same redemptive qualities in the man Lalana seemed to, but at least he knew Bhandary had some sort of weakness besides his obvious moral shortcomings.

It was also a relief to know he and Benford had been wrong in their earlier assumption. For a lot of reasons.

Lorca gave a small snort of laughter at the mental picture of Peter Bhandary wandering around the Dartaran's house naked in the middle of the night crying. "Right, well, we should probably get you sat down with a tactical officer to go over the Dartarans' compound."

"Oh," said Lalana, sounding disappointed. "You do not want me to show it to you directly in person?"

Lorca thought about that. Lalana knew the place top the bottom and would be an invaluable resource on the ground in a pinch, but she also remained a somewhat unknown quality. He had to trust that her interest in stopping the hunting of her people was sincere. Besides, they'd gone over so many details every which way with Lalana, and she'd been vivid, thorough, and consistent, all classic signs of honesty. Either she was the galaxy's greatest secret agent or exactly what she appeared to be. He had to think a spy sent to embarrass Starfleet would have had more prep on human mannerisms. Lalana had obvious deficits in that area. "You want to go with us? I didn't think you would."

"Are you going?"

Lorca took a deep breath. It was a conversation he was yet to have with Commander Benford, but no matter what Benford said, his mind was already made up. "Yes."

"Then I will go, too. I owe you my life. If there is a way, I will repay that. And until I do, I will at least endeavor to be helpful."

* * *

Benford disagreed, of course, but that was his job. "There's no reason for you to be the one personally going on this mission." They were in the ready room, but there was no tossing of the ball this time. The conversation was too serious.

"There's every reason for it, starting with the fact it's unsanctioned."

"Wait, you said Admiral Hatchet signed off..."

"Not officially. Officially, we're on leave, and they don't know what we're doing. Unofficially, they are aware and they do not agree with it."

Benford frowned. "Well, that does sound more like you. And Starfleet Command. But, captain, if you get discovered down there?"

"Then so be it. I'm the one dragged us out here. Look at it in reverse. Say I let you go, and you get caught. Now that's both our careers down the drain. Better we contain the damage, so if it goes sideways, at least one of us gets to keep a Starfleet career. You can even say you tried to stop me. No one will blame you for failing to do that."

Benford exhaled noisily through his lips. "Hard to argue with that."

"And yet, you did."

"What can I say. I'm just honored you're looking out for my career, captain."

Lorca grinned. "I wouldn't get too cozy in the captain's chair, Jack. I fully intend on coming back for it. You're just keeping it warm."

Benford grinned right back. "Seeing as you never sit in it, what do you care how warm it is?"

Lorca quirked an eyebrow and narrowed his eyes mock judgment. "If I don't come back and find that chair the _perfect_ temperature for my ass- better yet, burning. I want that chair so hot, you can cook an egg on it."

Benford picked up his padd and pretended to add an item to his to-do list. "Have Billingsley install thermonuclear cookers on captain's seat. She's still mad at you. I can't promise she won't do it."

The joking dropped away. "Still?" said Lorca, somewhat concerned. "I thought you gave her my peace offering."

"Give the woman more than a day, captain," replied Benford. "Better yet, take her with you. She'll feel important. Say it's recognition for how good she is at her job, that you wanted the best possible engineer with you."

"Hm. That's not a bad idea."

"I am full of 'not bad' ideas," boasted Benford.

"All right, where are we on the transmission prep..."

* * *

Lorca and his chosen few assembled in the shuttle bay. The team consisted of himself, Security Chief Morita, Lt. Russo, Billingsley, Carver, and Lalana. They were dressed in civilian clothes of varying style, except for Lalana, who was wearing nothing at all.

Lorca had chosen a sharp dark grey jacket for himself, unadorned but well-cut, over a linen-white shirt and lighter grey slacks. Morita looked no less imposing than usual in a dark green kaftan and black leggings, while Billingsley had opted for a brown leather jacket, scarf, and jeans, and Carver was wearing some sort of dingy old maintenance or flight suit that might have been grey, blue, black, brown, or even purple when it was new. Impossible to say. Russo, the only other man present, had opted for a black t-shirt and slacks. Lorca wondered if he was being intentionally unobtrusive. If so, good.

"All right, everyone, you know the mission, you know the stakes, and if anyone wants off, now's the time, because the minute we're out of visual range, ship communications are terminated. Any questions?"

Not a one, even from Lalana, which was a welcome surprise. Lorca signaled and they marched onto the shuttle.

Carver had them smoothly underway a minute later and the Triton disappeared from view without fanfare. They were on their own.

Lorca opened his pack. "Fortune cookies," he announced, tossing one to Russo and then Morita. "For luck."

"Thank you," said Lalana.

He brought the last two up to Carver and Billingsley in front. "Thank you, sir," said Carver, flashing him a genuine smile, but Billingsley just glowered slightly as she took hers and put it on the console.

"Open it," said Lorca, cracking his. "That's an order."

Carver had already opened hers. "Have old memories and young hopes," she read aloud.

"Take the chance while you still have the choice," recited Russo. It certainly applied.

Billingsley opened hers and stared at it.

"Well, don't leave us in suspense," chided Lorca. Billingsley winced. Lorca reached over her and took the fortune from her hands. "'The future belongs to those who follow their dreams.' What, too sentimental?" He handed it back. Billingsley sort of stared at it and the two halves of her cookie, wondering if she was obligated to keep the paper and eat the cookie, or if opening the thing had been enough.

Morita had gotten "Your sweetheart may be too sweet for words, but not for arguments."

"Captain, what does mine say?" asked Lalana.

Lorca took the paper from her. "The good thing about repeating past mistakes is knowing when to cringe."

"Cringe?"

Lorca wondered how to explain it.

"Be embarrassed," supplied Russo.

"And yours?" Lalana asked.

Lorca didn't have to reread it. "Patience is the key to joy."

"That one is true!" said Lalana excitedly. "If you do not have patience, how can you endure the times which are unhappy to reach the happy ones?"

Lorca sat back down next to Lalana, closed his eyes, and let her yammer at the others for a while. Carver and Morita even reciprocated with questions, Carver's about lului, and Morita on the subject of minor tactical details regarding the Dartaran compound and the Dartarans themselves. It was a decent way to pass the time. They ran into a single Dartaran patrol, who accepted their authentication codes as a private delivery service (codes that had been in the Triton's databanks from an incident with the service two weeks earlier) and let them pass.

"Captain, we're in visual range."

Lorca joined Carver and Billingsley at the front of the shuttle, leaning over their seats.

Tederek VI was small for a gas giant, but its vibrant mix of red and orange was very striking. It looked sort of like a smaller but more visually intense Jupiter. A few small craft were moving about its seventeen moons, six of which were inhabited, and there were also two small space stations.

Carver pointed at a small yellow rock. "That's the one. Moon number eight."

The eighth moon was not as large as some of the others, but at almost a million kilometers of surface area, it was still impressive.

Lalana brushed past Lorca and stood almost directly beneath him, stretching up and gripping her arms against the console so she could see as well.

"We're being scanned," announced Billingsley.

"Type?"

"Radiation, cursory bio, low-level cargo sweep."

They waited a moment. Nothing further happened, except Lalana's tail brushed against Lorca's leg as she balanced herself.

"Nice thing about Dartarans," said Carver amiably, "they really don't like to stick their nose in other people's business."

"Meaning?" said Lorca.

"They're not asking us for any ident or course information. Looks like as long as we're not carrying anything dangerous or heading to one of the stations, they really don't care." She sounded very pleased.

They neared the moon enough to make out various features. Though light yellow at a distance, shades of brown and green emerged on approach, as well as various geographic features: craters filled in with trees, forests across most of the surface, an old river of dust that had been preserved post-terraforming for some reason.

"Scanning for structures," said Billingsley.

"Keep it narrow, we don't want to trip any alarms," warned Lorca.

Billingsley wanted to retort but bit her tongue. "I've detected an energy signal consistent with the barrier." The barrier in this case was a large, reinforced fence surrounding Margeh and T'rond'n's estate that kept their game from bleeding out onto other estates.

"Anyplace we can set down, Carver?"

"Um," said Carver, throwing variables into the computer, which rendered the suggestions into a visual overlay.

Lorca scanned the options. "There." He leaned forward and pointed at a spot between two hills. "Low and easy. Don't let them know we're coming." Carver plotted a respectably meandering course.

"Captain, I'm reading life signs," said Billingsley.

Lorca began to wonder if Billingsley was being intentionally obtuse. "It is an inhabited planet," he pointed out. "I'd be more surprised if you weren't."

If he weren't the captain, Billingsley would have smacked him, and even though he was, she was sorely tempted. "Sir," she hissed, and forced her console's display over the navigational one.

When she said she was reading life signs, she had not been lying. While there were scattered signals across the moon's surface, within the barrier of Margeh and T'rond'n's estate, there were more life signs than anywhere else. The display was lit up with them. The estate was crawling with life in such density it wasn't possible to ascertain what most of the life signs were.

Lorca looked down at Lalana. "When you said Margeh and T'rond'n liked to bring back live game from their hunts, how often do they do that?"

"Every time. Breeding pairs when they can."

"And how long have they been doing that?"

"Mm, for many years since before I joined them."

Well, thought Lorca. This just got more and more interesting.


	7. Bites the Hand That Feeds

A/N: What can I say, the fact that everything they do in the show feeds so perfectly into my fanfic is really very inspiring! When Lorca said "fortune favors the bold," I about lost it, since I titled one of the chapters "Fortune Favors the Brave." Also very happy that Lorca and Cornwell's relationship is as I expected, because that means I can proceed with the Cornwell stuff I had planned with only very minor adjustments. So, you can expect to see more of Cornwell down the line.

SarahELupin: Sorry, I meant to reply on the previous chapter and forgot! Fear not, Lorca is too clever to get blindsided by some sort of horrible scheme from Lalana of all people, though Lalana does have a secret of her own, and it will be revealed eventually... Also, I just realized you have the same first name as Billingsley! Even though it's just a coincidence (Billingsley's name was already Sarah in chapter one, it just didn't get mentioned), I hope you enjoy the increased role your namesake has in this and the coming chapters. Thank you for reading!

* * *

Carver parked the shuttle between the two little hillocks with ease, and though this wasn't quite enough to shield it completely from view, it was better than leaving it totally exposed. Dartaran homesteads were large by design and being parked far at the remote edge of two such estates lessened the chances of discovery considerably.

"All right, Carver, you know the drill. Anyone gets within a klick, you take this puppy up and keep out of trouble until we make contact. We can worry about extraction when the time comes, so long as you're still around somewhere to pick us up."

Carver flashed Lorca a smile that practically shone against the dusky tan color of her skin. She really was quite pretty. "You can count on me, captain."

"I don't doubt it. Rest of you, on me."

As they approached the barrier of Margeh and T'rond'n's estate, the difference was profound.

From the air, the hunters' domain was visibly much more green, carpeted with trees and other plants, but from the ground, it looked even denser. Layers of foliage dotted with flowers and growths of various colors were visible over the wall.

The wall itself consisted of two components: a concrete base that rose three and a half meters from the ground and an energy barrier generated by a system of poles and suspended wires rising another five meters from the concrete. The energy barrier had a faint hum at a distance that became more and more uncomfortable on approach. Not only was the barrier designed to keep prey inside, it was also designed to repel them by various means so they wouldn't approach in the first place.

Lorca winced and covered his ears. Russo seemed to be taking it especially bad, visibly reeling, and Billingsley looked disgusted.

Noticing the discomfort of her human companions, Lalana slowed her step and gripped her hands tightly together. "I am sorry, I did not know it was like this. I did not leave the house area."

"It's fine," grimaced Lorca, but Billingsley was glaring daggers at him and Lalana. "Russo, Morita, Lalana, you can hang back."

"Oh, this does not bother me," said Lalana, and continued forward with Lorca and Billingsley. Morita also proceeded forward, but only to grapple up the ladder so that Billingsley could reach the technological components of the wall to disarm the section. Then Morita joined Russo back at a more comfortable distance and scanned around with her rifle at the ready.

Billingsley opened her tool box. Her tools were packed in some foam. She ripped off two chunks, wet them in her mouth to soften them, stuck them in her ears, and wrapped her scarf around her head for good measure.

"May I?" asked Lorca, indicating her tool box.

"Fine," she said sharply.

The foam helped a bit, but even softened with saliva, it was a bit scratchy. Lorca put a hand on the ladder to steady it just in case.

"You don't have to be here," Billingsley said, taking hold of a ladder rung just above her head.

"I put you in this, don't make me regret coming over here to help."

With the rest of the crew standing out of earshot while she suffered through the pain, Billingsley felt emboldened to speak her mind. "Next time you want me for an away mission, don't. Just, don't." She proceeded up the ladder.

"Exactly why did you join Starfleet?" Lorca shot after her, but she either didn't hear him over the noise and the foam, or ignored the question.

After a few moments, she called down for a synchronic meter. Lorca located it in her toolbox and passed it up to her. Lalana sat on her haunches next to them, watching attentively.

Billingsley worked carefully but quickly, as eager to get the job finished as she was to do it right. There was a crackling sound. The faint energy glow on both sides of the pole she was working at flickered and went off. So too did the sound from those sections, lessening its intensity, though the painful buzzing continued from the adjacent sections so it wasn't completely gone.

Billingsley started down the ladder, hyperspanner in hand. "I've rerouted the power to bypass these two—"

Her foot slipped through the ladder as she stepped down and she tumbled backwards into the air. She didn't scream, there wasn't time, but for a moment she saw her hands stretched out into the sky towards nothing and panic swept over her like a rushing tide.

She squeezed her eyes shut as she landed, the air rushing out of her on impact, but instead of the hard ground beneath her spine, she felt like the ground had given way. She opened her eyes.

Lorca's face was inches from Billingsley's. One arm was around her back, the other under her knees. He looked mildly bemused. "Chief."

Horrified, Billingsley squirmed and he let her down. Jittery and embarrassed, she practically jumped away, almost stumbling over her own toolbox for good measure. She quickly tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear.

"You're welcome," said Lorca. Billingsley was still too shocked to say anything. Normally, Lorca would have thought this reflected yet another defect of her character, but in this instance, he let it slide. She was very clearly still processing what had just happened to her.

"That was very impressive," said Lalana. "You really are very adept at saving people."

Morita and Russo arrived with their gear. "Up and over," Lorca told them. "Carefully. We can't afford to lose anyone."

Morita went first and extended the ladder down the far side of the wall, then helped Russo raise and lower his equipment. Billingsley's toolbox went next, followed by Lalana, who ignored the ladder and simply hopped up the wall and then down the other side with ease.

Billingsley hung back. "Captain, I..."

"You usually wear magboots and gloves, don't you?" asked Lorca. "Because you grew up in high-G?"

Billingsley's eyes widened. Her cheeks reddened. She hadn't thought Lorca paid that much attention to the people on the Triton, especially given how everyone knew the assignment was only temporary until the Triton's upcoming decommission. "Yes, sir, but... it's no excuse."

"Could've happened to anyone, high-G or no. You think you can get up there again?"

"Yes, sir." She went to the ladder again.

"And, Sarah?"

Hearing her first name, her hand tightened on the ladder. "Sir?"

Lorca's face seemed much gentler. Kind, even. "I'll be right behind you."

Billingsley hastily turned away. "... Thank you, sir." She went up the ladder and Lorca followed right behind her.

* * *

The jungle was lush and full of life. Everywhere they looked, plants and animals abounded. Strange bird and bat creatures darted through the air, while whooping sounds emerged from distant trees that might have come from some kind of bird, or perhaps something like a monkey. There were flowers and fruits of every color imaginable and insects lazily buzzed through the air.

It would have been heaven to a biologist or botanist, but since they had neither in their little party, the richness of the living tapestry was somewhat wasted on them. Arzo would have liked it, Lorca thought. But they weren't here to catalogue new and unknown forms of life, they were here to complete a very specific mission.

Lalana took to these surroundings like a fish to water. She leapt into the trees almost at once and ran across the branches above them, pulling off leaves and flowers and fruits and berries with her tongue to snack on as they advanced. She even snapped a few bugs out of the air.

Morita took point while Lorca brought up the rear. Both knew better than to let their guard down around such beauty. Both the undergrowth and canopy were so thick, there was no telling what was hiding even two meters away from them. Billingsley's tricorder was next to useless in this situation. There were simply too many living things for it to provide any sort of information on lurking dangers.

On the plus side, the abundance of lifesigns also provided cover for them. Even if someone had been looking or known about their intrusion, it would have been very hard to find them.

Though they had chosen the barrier wall closest the house, it was still a decent walk. Margeh and T'rond'n's tract of land extended so far, Lalana had used the travel time on foot as part of the planning for her escape, and Lorca now fully appreciated why.

Lalana suddenly landed in their midst from a branch a good six meters above them, colored green as the trees. "Sliggen!" she exclaimed, practically bouncing. "Get into the trees!"

"What's a sli—"

There was a faint rumbling nearby. Deciding it didn't really matter what a sliggen was, they rushed towards the nearest trees with any footholds, handholds, or branches within reach and began to climb. Lorca practically hauled Billingsley up with him, mindful that she had the least climbing experience and was most likely to fall. Russo struggled to draw his equipment up into the trees, too, but Lalana smacked him with her tail. "Leave it!"

The rumbling turned into a mini-stampede very quickly and something like a giant centipede burst out from the undergrowth, snapping four giant mandibles into the air. It was almost as big around as a human, about twice as long, and thundered across the ground on more than fifty pointy legs that looked razor-sharp. They struck the ground with such rapid force there was a sharp thudding sound, and this sound multiplied by the quantity of legs produced quite a noise. Its forelegs were four times as long as the legs it walked upon and even sharper-looking.

Lalana was still on the ground. She jumped, very quickly, away from the tree Russo was climbing and landed heavily on the ground some distance away. The sliggen immediately whipped towards her and charged, but she was already up into the air and into the branches of the nearest tree, stomping her feet as she did.

Undeterred, the sliggen rushed up the tree trunk, slithering around it like a snake in Eden. Lalana did not stop for even a moment. She ran across the branch she was on and leapt clear through the air, soaring across the small clearing and into Billingsley and Lorca's arboreal refuge. "Sliggens hunt by ground vibrations," said said. "They are very aggressive and sometimes come to the house. The only thing worse than a sliggen is..."

Something roared with such strength, the trees shook around them. The multitude of large insects and flying creatures that had been present in the area seemed to have vanished.

The sliggen, which had moments earlier seemed hungry and murderous, now seemed terrified. It twisted around the tree in such confusion, it ended up trying to walk over itself. It hastily slithered down to the ground.

Giant footsteps pounded and shook the earth. The sliggen splayed its many legs out in confusion, disoriented as its primary method of navigation became untenable.

The creature that burst into the clearing was enormous. Lorca thought it to be about the size of an elephant, but had never actually been in the presence of an elephant, so wasn't entirely sure. Four-legged and covered in shaggy black-brown fur, the creature was shaped sort of like a yak or bison, with shoulders far more massive than its haunches, but with its head set almost flat into those same shoulders rather than protruding forward. You wouldn't think something of its size could navigate a jungle of this density, but it was built like a battering ram. It didn't move through the jungle so much as bash its way through any obstacles with a long trail of trampled trees and plants behind it.

"I'm going to go out on a limb and say that," said Lorca.

"Captain!" hissed Billingsley, aghast at his propensity to make a joke given the danger of the situation.

"Ssss!" Lalana hushed them.

The creature rose up on its hind legs and brought its front legs down on the sliggen with such force, it liquified the sliggen in two places. Dark purple goo splashed out across the ground. The intact sections of the sliggen writhed and twitched death throes.

But the monster wasn't done. It wasn't enough that it had killed the sliggen. It began prancing around on the sliggen's body repeatedly, seemingly just for the joy of watching the sliggen's innards paint the ground. It stomped and stomped until the sliggen was nothing more than eggshell fragments and purple paste.

The creature did not leave the clearing immediately. It began wandering around, sniffing, and walked up to a leafy plant. It opened its mouth and began chomping down on the leaves.

Unbelievably, the monster was _vegetarian_.

They waited as it meandered around, eating leaves, butting its deep-set head against trees for some reason. Wanton destruction? Dislodging of ripe fruit? Looking for companionship? Lorca had no clue. What he did know was that they needed this creature gone if they were ever going to continue, and it seemed unwilling to leave on its own.

He signaled Morita. They both raised their phaser rifles.

"Wait!" said Lalana, but too late.

Their shots hit the monster squarely in its haunch. Neither gun was set to kill; the goal had been to drive the thing away with a smack on its rump. Unfortunately, this was not how it reacted. It whirled about, bellowing so loudly everything shook again, and charged.

It hit the tree Lorca, Lalana, and Billingsley were in with such force, the tree groaned and tilted. Billingsley wrapped her arms and leg around the branch they were on with a shriek and Lorca barely managed to keep both his seat and his phaser rifle.

The creature backed up.

"Aim for the eyes!" said Lalana.

Lorca got off a shot just before the creature hit the tree again, hitting near an eye, but not directly in it. The creature hit the tree again with such impact it knocked the rifle from Lorca's hands. The rifle's strap was around Lorca, so it didn't fall far, but the tree shifted another five degrees and he was unable to get hold of the rifle while holding on to the tree for dear life. Additionally, though his rifle had been set to kill, the creature seemed entirely undeterred by its wound.

Morita managed a better shot as the creature backed up for a third go. The eye she hit burst and dribbled milk-white liquid down the creature's face. This drew its attention to the tree she and Russo were in, which was much smaller. When the creature charged them, it knocked their tree almost halfway down.

"Draw it's attention!" said Lalana, whipping Lorca's rifle back into his hand with her tail.

Precision was impossible, but also unimportant. Lorca fired off three shots in rapid succession, hitting the creature in its massive shoulder and successfully returning its attention back to the bigger tree. It charged them again. Lorca let out an involuntary shout as the impact reverberated up the tree and into his shoulder. Billingsley sobbed.

The creature took a step backwards, preparing for another charge. Lalana dropped from the tree onto its shaggy shoulder.

Feeling something land on it, the creature immediately bucked, but Lalana flattened herself against its back, the tendrils of her epithelial filaments grabbing hold of its fur like a thousand million tiny velcro hooks. It bucked again and again, each time pounding its massive, flat feet into the ground with tremendous force, but to no avail. Lalana was attached to it as firmly as its own fur. It was like she was an extension of its own body.

Lalana seemed to slide across the creature towards its face. Her tail managed to find its way onto the creature's wounded eye. Then it disappeared into the eye, almost as if sucked inside.

The creature roared with even more fury and began to charge with Lalana clinging to its face. Lorca could only watch as the creature prepared to smash Lalana into paste against a tree trunk.

Half a dozen monstrous paces from its target, the creature shuddered and collapsed, its momentum flipping it over as Lalana scrambled free and leapt away. The creature thudded harmlessly against the intended tree trunk, dead.

Lorca realized he had been holding his breath and gasped. Beside him, Billingsley whimpered.

The humans carefully descended from their branches, glad to be back on solid ground again. Billingsley didn't make it very far. Her legs were like jelly from how tightly she had been clinging to the branch and she remained shaken, but otherwise she was fine. "Nice shot," Lorca said to Morita. Russo went to check the communications equipment. It had gotten thrown aside when the creature hit the smaller tree, but was carefully-packed and intact.

Lorca and Morita joined Lalana beside the creature. Lalana's tail vibrated, expelling the creature's ocular fluid in a cloud of white mist. Morita nudged it with the tip of her rifle. It was well and truly dead. "Its eyes are right next to its brain," offered Lalana in explanation.

Russo and Billingsley made their way over together, Billingsley leaning on Russo for support. They all stood around the carcass, awed. "What was it?" asked Lorca.

"A leskos," said Lalana. "From Fhtadero III."


	8. The Illusion of Choice

Ideally, they would have found a way to hide the carcass lest Margeh and T'rond'n happen upon it, but it was simply too big. Its hide was so thick they couldn't even slice it up into pieces small enough to hide with their rifles on the highest setting. Ultimately, they shoved a stick in the eye in the hopes its death might look like an accident. At least Lalana was certain the beast's roaring wouldn't have alarmed the Dartarans any: the leskos often roared when it was rampaging.

"I can see why Dartarans like their neighbors at a distance," quipped Lorca, but everyone was a little too exhausted and shaken up by the experience to appreciate the attempt at lightheartedness.

Even Lalana seemed to have lost her cheer. She hovered around the leskos, her hands firmly locked together, her tail twitching like mad. Lorca indulged her this for a few minutes while Billingsley and Russo checked the equipment, but then then it was time to go. He joined her next to the carcass. "We need to get moving," he announced.

"It is wrong to kill something you do not eat," Lalana said in response, "but it is too big to eat. The poor thing. It was not kind, but it was only being itself. It is the greatest gift to be able to be yourself. So many things are not themselves."

Lorca noted she was more upset about the leskos' death than the death of Lalaran, and the leskos had been trying to kill her. It seemed crazy on the surface, but he remembered what she had said in the turbolift. "It didn't get to choose its death?"

"No," she said. "It did not." Lalana turned away from the leskos and they resumed the trek.

The leskos seemed to have chased all other life out of the area. Billingsley held her tricorder with both hands and stared at the ongoing scan results, fixating to avoid thinking of anything else, while Lalana trudged along in the rear with Lorca, hunched and still upset.

Lorca watched her carefully. "Looks like you've repaid that debt," he said.

"Maybe."

"No, most certainly. Thank you." He said it with genuine appreciation, hoping Lalana would see the good of what she'd done and realize it was the lesser of two evils.

She didn't answer.

Undeterred, Lorca attempted distraction instead. "Say, what was that thing you did with your tail?"

Lalana didn't answer right away. " _Lelulallen_."

"Lulu..."

She said it again, more slowly: "Le-lu-lal-len."

"Lelu... lallen. As in, _lallen_?"

"Yes, exactly!" Her voice rose happily for a moment, excited he had remembered the term and connected it. "Lelullalen is when you use the strands of your hair to push aside another creature's cells, and you enter past the cellular barrier." Her time in sickbay had helped inform the translator on a number of lului medical terms.

The excitement vanished from her voice as quickly as it had come. "I pushed the cells of the leskos aside, and into its brain directly behind the... the ocular..." He foot dragged against the ground and she stopped moving. She gripped her hands so tightly it looked painful. "Lelulallen is... is for healing... I..."

Lorca stopped as well, immediately discerning this had been a terrible conversation choice. She had been so nonchalant about Lalaran and everything else.

She looked at him with her enormous green eyes. "I killed him." Her fur shuddered and rippled. "I killed him!" Lalana absolutely crumpled, planting her face into the dirt and balling up into a small, shivering mound. Her fur trembled and turned into the same yellow-green-brown mixture as the ground beneath her.

The commotion drew Morita's attention and she halted at the front. Everyone looked at Lorca. They weren't entirely friendly looks, and it didn't help that Lorca's expression had the mild edge of someone who'd just been caught with a hand in the fortune cookie jar.

 _Crap_ , he thought. This was neither the time nor the place. "Lalana? Lalana, get up." She didn't move. Without missing a beat, Lorca called out to the others, "Go on ahead, we'll catch up." Billingsley and Russo exchanged glances, but Morita barked at them to move, and they complied. "And keep your eyes open!" Not that they needed the reminder.

Lorca crouched down, rifle in hand. "Lalana, listen to me. You didn't have a choice. It was it, or us."

"There is always a choice," she whimpered.

"Not when survival's on the line."

"Even then."

Lorca had killed before. It came with the job, working tactical in Starfleet, and whenever it came down to killing someone or being killed, Lorca chose himself every time. Clearly, Lalana felt differently. It was offensive, really. His teeth gritted in anger.

"Now you listen up. I didn't save you so you could die on this goddamn moon. I've put everything on the line for you and your people. I get it, you're upset. You killed something. That's life. It happens. You can feel sorry for yourself when we're back on the ship. But right now, you get up, and you move. After everything you've been through, you're really telling me you're giving up here?"

Lalana shook and trembled, but whimpered out, "No."

"So come on. I _will_ carry you if I have to..." It wasn't entirely clear if that was a threat or an offer. Honestly, at this point, it was whichever got them moving.

She uncurled from the ground. Lorca exhaled in relief. She wasn't exactly steady as she stood, but she was standing, which was a victory unto itself.

There was dirt on her eyes. Directly on them. "You have some... on your eye..." He pointed at his own eye in that way humans do when they're mirroring something for each other. She raised her arm to her face and polished her lenses back to glossy shine with her fur, then vibrated away the various bits of dirt, twigs, and leaf stuck to her.

She still seemed a little wobbly, leaning heavily on her tail, and she was still yellow-brown-green. "You got it?" he asked, and offered his hand.

She looked at the hand a moment, then reached out and curled her four fingers around his index finger. It was enough assistance for her to steady herself and begin moving again, albeit at a slow pace.

Her hands, like her feet, consisted of two pairs of digits set in opposition to each other, rather like she had two index fingers and two thumbs, an arrangement seen in some Earth birds. As Dr. Ek'Ez had described it in his report, _heterodactyly_. Her hands were perfectly suited to gripping tree branches, and equally good for gripping human fingers.

The sound of insects and other living things was beginning to return to the forest around them, signalling that whatever mass exodus had occurred as a result of the leskos' arrival on the scene had reached its end.

Lalana seemed to regain her sense of self as they walked. Her pace began to increase until she finally released Lorca's hand and went bounding up into the trees again. She was happiest up there, apparently. She flashed colors as she went, changing to match the foliage and bark of the trees as she ran through them. No wonder lului were so hard to hunt. Lorca was having trouble following her, and he knew where to look.

"I see them!" Lalana called down from the leaves, sounding like her usual self again. The crew came into view. Morita was eating a protein ration bar. (The only person Lorca had ever seen voluntarily do so in a non-lethal situation.) Billingsley and Russo were sitting on top of their equipment boxes, looking moderately better than they had before.

Morita trotted over to Lorca, wiping a protein bar smudge from the corner of her mouth. "Thought you broke your alien there for a minute. Sir."

Lorca glanced up and located Lalana munching on a leaf. It looked like it tasted better than the protein bar, even to him. "Honestly? So did I."

* * *

The house was a long, wiggly-shaped, two-story structure, built with an irregular facade of water-worn mud brown stones and creamy pink towers made of something resembling stucco. Unlike the rest of the estate, it was surrounded by a 100-yard buffer of open space completely free of bushes and trees.

Lorca lowered the binoculars. "God, that's ugly." He passed the binoculars back to Morita.

Lorca and Morita were laying in the jungle undergrowth on their stomachs, obscured by the dense fronds of some sort of fern. Morita thumbed through the binocular settings. The energy scan revealed the Dartarans' invisible fence: a wall of invisible current designed to keep out wandering prey without obscuring the view. Another setting showed the two heat signatures of the Dartarans, as well as the heat signatures of various household amenities and power sources.

Lorca rolled onto his back and looked up. He didn't see Lalana, but he knew she was there. "Lalana, come take a look at this."

She dropped to the ground almost directly beside Lorca, causing him to jump slightly. He hadn't realized how close she actually was. Her color shifted to a shade and pattern of green and black more suited to the undergrowth than the tree she had just descended from.

Lorca took the binoculars from Morita and passed them to Lalana. "Can you tell us where in the house they are?"

Lalana took the binoculars, but had trouble holding them and didn't seem to understand how they worked. Lorca sighed and held them for her as he explaining how to look through. This turned out to be no easy task with eyes almost four inches in diameter. Lalana ended up closing up all the pupils in one eye, and all but one pupil in the other. It seemed to be an unnatural, difficult thing for her to do, but it allowed her to position herself to see through one side of the binoculars.

"That is the office. They are working." Lalana pulled back from the binoculars and opened her pupils, gazing skyward. "It is nearly time for last meal, at sundown, and after last meal, they will read for a bit, and then they will go to bed. The time from now to sundown once, and then again twice."

Lorca checked this against his watch, which included sunset and sunrise data. "So last meal is in an hour and a half, and they'll be in bed three hours after that?"

The durations were not familiar to Lalana, but she could follow the math. "Yes, that is right."

"Four and a half hours. What are we going to do to kill the time." Putting his hands behind his head, Lorca looked at Morita mischievously. She snorted with laughter and shook her head.

"Don't get any ideas, sir."

Lorca snorted right back. "I know I'm not your type, lieutenant commander."

That aspect of the conversation was lost on Lalana, who remained focused on the issue of the timeline. "We could simply go in during meal. They will be focused on eating, and the dining room is on the far side from the office. Also, the lights will not be out."

"I'd rather wait until they're asleep, captain," said Morita. "It would be safer."

Safer, sure, but Lorca hadn't gotten to where he was by playing things safe. "How long do they usually eat?"

Lalana's fingers twitched as she did the math. If now until sundown was an hour and a half, and three hours constituted the time from sundown until sleeping... "Half and a _lelli_ of an hour?"

"Half and a what? A _lelli_?"

"A _lelli_ is half of a half."

"Quarter," supplied Lorca, though at this point the translator would have picked up on the word for itself. "Three quarters of an hour."

"A half and a quarter, yes. Three quarters is an unfortunate way to phrase it."

He squinted thoughtfully. "Unfortunate how?" She hadn't indicated any religious leanings, but every culture seemed to have its own superstitions. He was reminded of the old Earth one about the number thirteen.

"Three is..." Lalana held up a four-fingered hand. "Not a popular number with lului. We like numbers that can be halved. They feel nicer."

"Numbers have a feeling?"

Lalana's tongue clicked and she sat down beside Lorca, close enough that what passed for her thigh was touching the side of his hip. "Everything has a feeling! And it is always different, You, this tree, the ground, the air..."

"Captain," said Morita, interrupting an exchange that felt like it might not have an end in sight. "Are we going to wait until they're asleep?"

Lorca smiled. "We most certainly are not."


	9. Under the Wire

_A/N: Sorry for the long delay! I made my own Halloween costume this year which took 40+ hours, and then I was involved in a wedding. I didn't have any time left over to write! But I'm back at work with laser focus on the fic again. Also, big thanks to tumblr user iwanttosaveyoufromyourself, who did me the favor of copy-editing all the previous chapters. There were a few mistakes here and there, but they have hopefully all been corrected now. (I'm an editor by profession, but it's so hard to edit your own writing.)_

* * *

They approached the house under cover of darkness, circling around from the back to keep as much distance between themselves and the dining room as possible. It wasn't, strictly speaking, necessary for them to do this, but having the benefit of several walls and no clear line of sight between them and the Dartarans was a great comfort for Russo and Billingsley in particular.

What was not a comfort was having Lalana running around in the trees under cover of darkness. Though the Starfleet-issue night vision glasses were top notch and lit the forest to crystal clarity, there was something instinctively unsettling about strange noises from above in the dark, and after about three minutes of fighting the urge to fire his rifle into the trees (and nearly actually doing so), Lorca called Lalana down to the ground to walk with them. She took the lead: her twelve pupils were so wide in the dim light, her eyes looked almost totally black with thin slivers of green, and she clicked her tongue at the sight of her human companions in their funny eye gear because they couldn't see very well in the dark.

They broke through the trees in the vicinity of the shuttle landing pad. Lorca found a small but meaningful dose of satisfaction at seeing the empty spot where the second Dartaran transport should have been, but wasn't.

Their first task was to disable the invisible fence. Billingsley was characteristically annoyed at having to do this in night vision goggles, but the technology was almost identical to the compound's external fence system. She disarmed a small section of it with ease using the same technique as before: bridging the power to create the illusion of an unbroken fence while providing them with a gap wide enough to slip through.

The motion sensors went next, disabled by a perfect pair of shots from Morita's rifle carefully calibrated according to Billingsley's specifications. This created a small corridor from their position up to the house completely free of any sensors, but they held their position outside the fence, waiting and watching for any sign that the Dartarans had noticed the minor faults in their security system. The system had been designed to alert them to any encroaching creatures from the forest, not withstand a coordinated break-in attempt, and both Dartaran signatures remained in the dining room, oblivious.

This was the point where, had the Dartarans noticed, they would have aborted the attempt and returned after the Dartarans went to bed. Now they were committed to finishing before lights out. Lorca signaled and they advanced on the mansion.

Creeping past the landing pad, they met their first real obstacle in the form of the door. After almost ten minutes, Billingsley announced she couldn't possibly open it without tripping an internal alert that a door had been unlocked and opened.

"When a door closes," prompted Lorca. Billingsley didn't follow.

"A window opens?" offered Russo.

The windows of the house were small, round, recessed portholes. Lorca clearly wasn't going to fit through, and Russo likely wouldn't, either, but Billingsley stood a chance, and Morita definitely could.

Billingsley scanned the windows with her tricorder. They had half as many security measures as the door. "Doable," she agreed.

"I'll go," said Morita.

Billingsley fixed Lorca with a look of dark determination, eager to make up for her earlier embarrassment. "No. Let me do it."

Lalana went up to the window first. She scaled the wall as easily as she had the trees, gripping the smooth stone outcroppings with vise-like hands and feet and perching on the vertical surface as comfortably as most people sat on a chair. There was something very satisfying about watching her in her native element, like watching a master craftsman at work, only the mastery in this case was the result of the guiding hand of evolution rather than years of training. Lalana eased the ladder into position perfectly and with minimal noise, then watched with freakishly black eyes as Billingsley proceeded up and crawled into the porthole tunnel.

From the ground, only Lalana and Billingsley's feet were visible, and neither offered much in the way of a progress report. Lorca frowned and shifted his weight, resolutely staring at Billingsley's feet for any clues.

"I should be up there," said Morita. She was still monitoring the Dartarans' location; Morita was nothing if not relentlessly cautious. She was an excellent security officer, but if she didn't learn to take a few more risks, she likely wouldn't advance much further in the ranks. "What if they get caught?"

Lorca had already anticipated and planned a course of action for that possibility, but it was so remote it didn't merit mentioning. "Lalana's with the chief. They'll be fine."

"Yes, sir." Morita left unvoiced her lingering concern that maybe they shouldn't be throwing everything to the wind for an alien they'd met a few days ago, even if that alien seemed sincere and had a worthwhile plight for Starfleet to resolve. Lorca had clearly decided they were going to pursue this adventure and it was too late to try and stop him now.

Billingsley's feet disappeared into the porthole. No alarms went off. Lalana released the ladder and vanished into the tunnel after her.

They waited. One minute, two. The door opened.

It was warm inside, and dimly-lit, but bright enough to see by. Lorca pushed the night vision glasses up on his head. "Well done, both of you."

"Thank you, captain."

"Thank you, captain!"

The house's interior was as brown as the exterior with what looked to be peach-colored ceilings, though it was hard to tell with the dim, yellow cast of the diamond-shaped wall sconces. Apparently Dartarans really went for the whole pink and brown color combination. Lorca took lead this time, rifle at the ready, though all signs indicated this side of the house was empty.

Their first destination was the house's central control box: its nerve center and brain. Billingsley and Russo worked together to install a siphon and intercept module which would route all the Dartarans' outgoing transmissions through to a beacon instead of the usual communications channels, allowing the Triton to listen in on everything and hijack the signal entirely.

Next was the office. In stark contrast to the exterior and hallways, the office was decorated with swaths of red fabric: wall curtains draping from the ceiling to the floor, bunched up to create an artistically curving zig-zag pattern of ripples in the cloth. Lorca had seen similar wall curtains in the Dartaran entry of Starfleet's database. It seemed to be how Dartarans decorated important state rooms where meetings took place. Russo, who had brushed up on the same database files before the mission, wondered if other rooms were so strictly delineated by distinct decorating styles in Dartaran culture.

A desk console sat in the middle of the room, copper-brown in color, with two rocky pillars that served as chairs and a low shelf of heavy, hand-bound books. Russo wired his tricorder directly into the console, ran a quick password crack, and set about accessing the Dartarans' files. "I want every piece of communication since Lalana's escape, any references to hunting lului, and give me everything on Peter Bhandary while you're at it," ordered Lorca. Russo scrambled to search the Dartarans' personal database and began transferring data.

"Sir!" Morita hissed in sudden alarm. "One of them's coming!"

Lalana stretched up on her legs in alert. "Across the hall!"

Russo jabbed his finger at his tricorder to cancel the data transfer. It didn't respond. He jabbed it again, and again, to no avail. He reached for the data cable, but Billingsley grabbed his hand. "No! You'll break their system!" On the tricorder, the words "Unstable Data Matrix, Please Wait" appeared. Presumably, this referred to the Dartarans' data storage expressing some sort of system instability.

Lorca didn't waste a moment. "Go," he ordered, pushing Russo aside from the console. Russo, Billingsley, and Morita followed Lalana into the hallway. Billingsley glanced back for the briefest of moments and hoped the captain had a really good plan.

Whether the plan was good, time would soon tell, but Lorca did at least have an idea. The progress bar on the tricorder was moving, but slowly. It looked like it needed at least two more minutes. "Goddamn technology," muttered Lorca, grabbing two octagonal bound notebooks from the shelf and putting them on top of the tricorder. A bit of the wire was still visible, but easily overlooked.

Lalana returned, closing the door behind her carefully. She jerked her tail towards the door three times. Lorca understood: three. Not good.

Lalana silently bounded over to the other side of the room. There was a small gap in the curtains. She swept it aside with her tail, revealing a second door. Lorca shut off the console monitor and joined her, because while there was no telling what lay on the other side, anywhere was better than here.

The second door turned out to lead to a room completely unlike anything else Lorca had seen so far. It was bright, glaringly so, with a intense, flat, sterile white tone that reminded Lorca of a hospital. The room was L-shaped and covered in a pale, metallic blue material. There was a mirror to the left set above something that looked like it dispensed some type of liquid and a strange copper box was attached to the adjacent wall. Around the corner to the right was a large pit of fine yellow sand recessed into the ground and partly covered by a metal grate.

They heard the hallway door to the office open. Now only one door lay between them and whoever was on the other side, and one door didn't feel like nearly enough, so Lorca beelined for the sandpit and tucked himself under the metal grating on the nearest side, minimizing his visibility from the entrance. Lalana jumped down after him and pressed herself against as much of his body as she could cover, her tail draping across his shoulder and just touching his neck, then turned herself the color of the sand.

Sounds were audible from the office. T'rond'n's low, booming voice called out, "I found it!" He'd left something in the office, apparently. Fair enough.

But T'rond'n didn't exit back to the hallway. He opened the door behind the wall curtains and entered the bright, blue room.

Lorca's finger readied on the trigger of his rifle. While he was as hidden as he could be, if T'rond'n came close enough or actually looked in the sandpit, the jig would be up.

T'rond'n took two steps and stopped in front of the mirror. There was a short series of plinking sounds. Then he noisily sniffed the air, grunted, and left.

Lorca waited until he heard the hallway door open and close, then waited some more. Lalana remained perfectly still beside him, not a single strand of her dermis moving.

They heard the hallway door open again. Someone rapped on the office wall softly, trying to find the door behind the curtains. Lalana removed herself from Lorca's side and he rolled out from under the grating and stood, catching sight of himself in the mirror. Half his body was covered in sand. (The night vision glasses also looked a mess pushed up on his head, but there was a certain element of roguish charm to them that wasn't entirely unbecoming.)

Morita found the door and poked her head in. "Captain," she said, glancing around the brightly-lit room in appraisal.

"Be right out," said Lorca, shaking the sand off his rifle, and Morita disappeared back into the office. "Now that's what we call an adrenaline rush."

"What is adrenaline?"

Despite the shaking, there was still sand on his gun. "Ask Dr. Ek'Ez that one."

Lalana touched her tail to the grating. "Sit here." Lorca obliged and Lalana brushed the sand from him, her dermal filaments much more precise and effective than his hand, picking out every miniscule grain of sand from his clothes and dropping it down through the grate. This was apparently the purpose of the grating: a place to sit while removing sand.

"Lalana," said Lorca, half-dreading the question, "why is there sand in here?"

Lalana brushed the sand from his jacket. "It is a Dartaran shower."

Lorca exhaled in relief. "Thank goodness for that." Dartaran bathroom facilities had not been adequately covered in Starfleet's files, but he'd be sure to amend that oversight once they were back on the Triton, assuming he could do so without anyone asking how he'd come by this information.

"What did you think it was?"

"A litterbox," Lorca admitted after a moment.

"Litter...?" she repeated. Lorca explained and Lalana's tongue clicked with laughter and her shoulders shook. "A litterbox! And you jumped into it?"

"Well it was a good thing I did," he countered. Tactically, at least.

"It was very clever," she agreed. She pointed to the copper box on the wall. "That is the litterbox."

It was markedly devoid of sand. Lorca snorted with amusement. "Not a litterbox, a toilet."

"I see," said Lalana cheerily, as if the distinction between the two meant nothing to her (which it probably did not). Her tail swept up past Lorca's cheek and pressed against the side of his head.

He winced, anticipating some sort of tugging or wriggling, but she extracted the said from his hair with such delicacy it felt like a gentle breeze against his scalp. "I do hope T'rond'n's teeth will be all right," she said.

Lorca frowned, surprised by the apparent non sequitur. "His teeth?"

"He will probably get gum rot again now that I am gone, even though I am right here." She passed her tail over Lorca's hair a second time, presumably to make sure all the sand was out, and then stepped back. Lorca looked as pristine as he had before entering the pit, which was to say, rumpled from a day in the jungle, but clear of any sand.

Lorca recalled the plinking noise. The reason it had sounded somewhat familiar—it had been T'rond'n picking his teeth. But what did that have to do with... "Please tell me you didn't use your tail to clean T'rond'n's teeth."

Lalana obligingly said nothing.

Lorca sighed exaggeratedly, partly annoyed by this revelation, partly impressed by the practicality of it. "He kept you captive. If he gets 'gum rot,' it'll be what we humans call 'karma.' When you do something bad and bad things happen to you." Or the reverse, though it didn't seem to apply in this particular situation.

"T'rond'n isn't bad," said Lalana. "He and Margeh simply wanted to hunt a difficult prey. I gave them an excellent hunt."

"Still... Don't you want a little bit of cosmic revenge?"

Lalana rubbed her fingers together thoughtfully. "I do not see what I gain from it. It just makes T'rond'n unhappy. I would rather he be happy. I would rather all people be happy."

Lorca realized it was hopeless. Lalana didn't seem to have a judgmental bone in her body. "All right, then," he said, as if some conclusion had been reached, and stepped up onto the grating, exiting the sandpit. Lalana lingered in the pit a moment, using her tail to erase any trace of their presence from the surface of the sand, then hopped up beside him.

She was still sand-colored. "We're you going to change back?"

"I like this color," she said. "You like blue better?" Lorca shrugged slightly and she turned blue again. He'd assumed the blue was her natural color, but apparently it was a fashion choice.

They returned to the office. "Progress report," said Lorca immediately. Russo looked up from the console, Billingsley hovering over his shoulder.

"I have all the comm logs of the past week, and everything on Bhandary, but... nothing on the lului hunting. If it's in here, it's not searchable by any keywords I can think of, and there's no comm logs with any of the names of the traders. Either the records have been purged, degraded, or their point of contact is someone else. I have the date range of Lalana's arrival, but... there are too many logs, it'll take hours to review them."

"Grab everything you can to bring back to the Triton."

"Yes, sir."

Russo went about his work under Billingsley's watchful eye. (She hated Lorca hovering over her shoulder, but was apparently fine doing the same thing to someone else.) There was nothing else for Lorca, Lalana, and Morita to do but wait. "ETA, Lieutenant?" asked Lorca.

"Ten minutes, sir."

Billingsley immediately chimed in, "More. We have to go slow, their storage system isn't designed to handle this much active data at once. It's very fragile. If we go any faster, we risk damaging their data crystals irreversibly."

Lorca didn't care about any of the technical issues, just the timeframe. There was something he wanted to do.

* * *

It seemed only fair, having received a tour of the Triton, that Lalana provide Lorca with a tour of the Dartarans' home. The house was spectacularly ugly by most human standards, but it was impressively large, and Lalana knew every inch of the place.

The tour was restricted to the half of the house furthest from the dining room. Even with that restriction, there were some interesting sights, like the Dartarans' trophy hall. Most of the rooms featured some form of hunting trophy as decoration, but the trophy hall was devoted entirely to the hobby. Preserved creatures from dozens of worlds, bones and skulls, hides and holographic images—everywhere he looked, something strange and unfamiliar looked back.

Lalana went to a display cabinet with several small trophies and skeletons and pointed to a box. "These are Lalaran's lenses," she said. Two clear, glasslike discs sat on a bed of dark green fabric. She picked one up and offered it to Lorca. It was the same size as Lalana's eyes, made of a material like crystallized chitin, startlingly clear. The curvature of the edges bent the light slightly, possibly indicating lului had 180-degree-or-better sight.

Lorca handed it back and pointed to some six-inch spikes with bands of black and turquoise. "What are these?"

"Ah! Those are stingers from Orendan wasps. Very nasty, they shoot them at intruders." There was a horn from a hornbuck, wings from a vimeria moth, the three heads of an Aldebaran serpent mounted together, and a complete Trellan crocodile preserved with a plasticization process. A beautifully iridescent hide belonged to a Strykelian ram, while a stretch of multicolored scales running almost a full four meters along the wall came from a giant mud snake native to the swamps of Cetos IV that could topple large trees with its constriction.

Every single creature seemed to have some vicious or clever mechanism that provided a challenge for the Dartarans. It was a marvel how so many creatures had evolved such disparate yet effective mechanisms for hunting and defending themselves. Lorca ran his fingers along the ridges of a mounted fish resembling a cross between a pufferfish and an angler with vivid red spots on its cheeks.

"Do you like this room?"

Lorca withdrew his hand, realizing how this must look to Lalana. An entire room devoted to the glorification of hunting. "It's very interesting," he said noncommittally.

"I love this room. There are so many different creatures from so many different worlds!"

Lorca was taken aback. "It doesn't... bother you?"

"Well, yes," she admitted. "It would be so much better if they had eaten them all. But I like to see what things from other worlds look like, so I am glad that not every species eats what they kill, else how would I have seen these things?"

Lorca parsed this carefully. "The _only_ thing that bothers you is they didn't eat everything they killed?"

Lalana shifted her weight, uncertain what he expected her to say.

"You're not bothered by the fact they go gallivanting around, hunting other things the same way they hunted you?" He recalled what she had said about Lalaran. "The things they hunt don't get to choose how they die."

"You're a hunter, too, aren't you?"

Lorca froze. His hands were on his rifle and he hadn't been able to contain his interest in the trophies, yes, and he had been hunting, but... "Not—not intelligent species." Not in the sense of hunting, anyway. There was a very big difference between hunting something and facing an opponent in a combat situation.

"All species are intelligent. Maybe not as much as us, but, they all live and breed and follow their instincts. Perhaps there are other beings out there that are to us as we are to insects. So, how smart something is has nothing to do with its right to live."

Lorca felt like he had to draw a philosophical line in the sand here. "Now hold on a minute. There's a big difference between killing something that only has baser instincts and killing something that can talk."

"Not from the perspective of the 'baser instinct' creature."

"Yes," insisted Lorca, "because it doesn't have the cognitive function to appreciate its... own mortality. Can you really say you like this room when you're also saying it's wrong to kill anything unless you eat it, and everything has a right to live?"

There was a brief pause. Then Lalana erupted into tongue clicks. Lorca crossed his arms, not seeing the humor. It took a long time for the clicking to subside. "That's the opposite, captain! I do not mean everything has a right to live. I mean there is no difference between killing something intelligent and killing something which is not. I don't mean to suggest that either death is wrong. They are what they are."

"So if a lului killed another lului..."

Lalana tilted her head. "Why would a lului do that?"

Lorca fixed her with a look that suggested the reasons were obvious. "Jealousy, argument, accident, fighting a war. Why does anyone kill anyone?"

"We have no wars, but... if a lului somehow killed another in an accident, they would be obligated to eat the dead one."

Several emotions played out on Lorca's face in succession, ranging from surprise and disbelief to calculated understanding and disgust. "You... _eat_ each other."

"Not as a general rule, but if one of us caused the death of another, we would be so obligated. What do you do if you kill someone?"

It wasn't completely true to say that there were not and had never been human cannibals, but for the most part, it was not an acceptable practice. "Burial. Cremation. In a really desperate survival situation... but it would have to be extreme. Eat the other person or starve. And even then, a lot of humans wouldn't do it."

"Starve? What's that?"

Lorca's communicator beeped for attention. It was Morita, reporting the data dump was complete. Lorca flipped the communicator shut and clipped it back to his belt, then returned his attention to Lalana. "Is your translator working? You've been asking a lot of questions." Perhaps Kerrigan wasn't up to the task of fleshing out the matrix and merited replacement with someone else.

Lalana tapped her knuckles twice. "It is working. I... had Ensign Kerrigan show me how to adjust it so that when there is a word in your language that doesn't not have a conceptual lului equivalent, it does not translate it. That way I can learn the word. Was that wrong?"

It was mildly inconvenient, but not wrong. It also meant two things. "So you've been learning English?" was the first.

"Yes."

The second was, "And you don't have a word for 'starvation' or 'starving?'"

"No, what is it?" Lalana listened to the definition with grim attentiveness. "Not having anything to eat... that is hard to fathom."

Lorca snorted in amusement. "Not every species can eat dirt." Or each other, for that matter. "Let's head back."

"Did you want to see my room before we leave?"

In her debrief, Lalana had mentioned being kept in a room most of the time, but hadn't described it much except to say it was white. Lorca grabbed his communicator again. "Morita, what's the status on the Dartarans?"

"Upstairs now," she reported.

"Going to bed," supplied Lalana.

They were in the clear, then. "We're going to make a quick pit stop. Meet you at the exit."

"Sir," confirmed Morita, sounding very professionally nonjudgmental, which was a credit to her training and personal discipline, because it entirely did not reflect her feelings about the mission at this point.

Lorca gestured for Lalana to lead on.

* * *

"Here it is."

While "white" was a perfectly accurate description of the room—it was almost entirely white except for the floors, which were brown—it somehow didn't convey the room's contents very accurately. A wall of white metal bars divided the room into two areas. There were more white metal poles in the cage area, but rather than serving as a partition, they formed a sort of metal forest of curves and branches.

The door to the cage was still open, as it had been when Lalana had escaped. Presumably the Dartarans saw no reason to close it now.

"It is very nice, no?"

It was stark, and white, and looked uncomfortable, but it did seem to have been designed for Lalana, providing her ample climbing space (though her range of motion would have been stymied somewhat by that puffy jumpsuit they'd strapped her in).

Lalana bounded into the open cage. "This is where the food was left, and this is where Lalaran died. There were no trees in here originally. Margeh added them for me. She noticed that I mostly stayed up on the bars and wanted to give me more things to climb. They were good owners, captain, so please don't think too badly on them."

It was hard to forget Lalana's desperate pleas for help during her escape and square that against her assertion of Margeh and T'rond'n as not such bad owners. "You ran away from them."

"Well, yes. But not because they were bad. Because..." She fell silent, hands clasped tightly.

Lorca's brow furrowed with concern. Nearly everything was an open book with Lalana. She was unashamed to admit to a societal policy that embraced cannibalism, unbothered at the idea of sentients outright murdering other sentients, and cheerily narrated the death of a fellow lului, but here at last was proof of that nagging feeling in the back of his head that she'd been holding something back from him.

"...because I had to stop the lului hunting. I owed it to my people."

He realized it was guilt, plain and simple. She felt guilty about having spent six years lounging around in what was to her a comfortable captivity while her people were still under threat. Probably she could have escaped much sooner had she really wanted to. No one needed six years to steal a shuttle. If she'd really tried, she probably could have managed the escape in half the time, if even that.

It was tremendously disappointing. Lalana had presented herself as a victim of circumstance, carefully plotting and planning for six years to orchestrate an escape, when in reality, she had apparently been content to ignore the injustice until the point when her guilt caught up to her and she'd finally decided to do the right thing. How many lului had died while Lalana had played in a jungle of metal trees, cleaning T'rond'n's teeth and admiring her captors' hunting collection?

Lorca abhorred injustice. He'd always made it a point to face it head on and immediately when he could. It was why he'd been so keen to help the lului. He hated that pervasive "out of sight, out of mind" mentality that let people stand by while others suffered, ignoring any problems which were not directly affecting themselves. Even now, Lalana seemed more concerned with Margeh and T'rond'n's reputations than the fate of her own people.

He realized he was being a little too harsh. There was clearly an element of Stockholm syndrome at play. Whatever she had or hadn't done, and whatever timeline she'd done it on, she had been in a difficult situation, the details of which were only partially known to him, and she felt bad. While he didn't love the sentiment "better late than never," because better sooner than later, it was true to an extent. "You did what you had to do," he said, but hollowly, because he didn't totally believe the sentiment.

"...Yes." She didn't sound convinced herself. She turned and looked around the cage. "It is strange to think this is the last time I will see this. But thank you for letting me do so."

"We really should get going," he said. Considering how long it had taken them both to get to this moment, it suddenly felt like there wasn't a minute to waste.


	10. Minimally Invasive Procedures

Aside from the house lights shutting off while they made their way out, exiting the Dartarans' house was uneventful. But once they were back in what Lorca considered to be the safety of the trees, there was apparently a problem. "All right, folks, let's head on back to the shuttle and get the hell out of here."

"We should wait here!" Lalana was, of course, the only one who would dare to suddenly contravene the captain's stated intention, but at least she had a reason. "It is very dangerous at night."

Lorca sighed. Why was nothing ever easy? "I thought the leskos was the most dangerous thing out here. It's dead."

"One of them is dead," said Lalana, because of course the Dartarans had thought it a good idea to own more than one of those murderous monsters, "and they are not active at night, but the things that are active at night..."

Lorca checked his watch. "It's eight hours until dawn. We are not going to wait here doing nothing for the next eight hours. I'd sooner land the shuttle on that pad over there and wake the Dartarans up." Particularly when he'd already made the internal decision not to waste any more time.

Billingsley perked up at the mention of the shuttle. "Is that an opt—"

"Absolutely not!" said Lorca, cutting her off. "Now move out."

Lalana fell into step beside Lorca in the rear, uncharacteristically quiet as they began the walk back to the compound's outer wall. After a minute, she finally said, "I know you prefer I stay down here, but I really think I should go into the trees, to see if there is danger."

"You realize I almost shot you earlier," said Lorca in a low voice. Lalana's rotating hands suggested that even if this was news to her, she did not mind it. "I assure you, a human with a gun is more dangerous than almost anything else out here."

"I don't think the non-human lifeforms are likely to attack me, captain."

"Because you have the same 'resonance' as 'background radiation?'" he said, sounding vaguely mocking. "I'm pretty sure the monsters here aren't using scanners."

"Because I don't have a scent. What would hunt me when I don't smell like food?"

"Dartarans for a start," said Lorca pointedly. "And humans, and Tremi, and Gorn."

"In the forest, I mean, and excepting you."

He hadn't meant it like that, and hearing it put that way gave him pause. "I wouldn't hunt you."

"Mm, because you wouldn't be able to catch me?" There was a smile in her voice, and a wink, despite the fact neither of these were actions she was physically capable of performing. The dire tension evaporated in an instant. Lorca had to bite his lip to keep from smiling.

"I'll have you know I'd catch you in a heartbeat," he said.

"A heartbeat, what is that?"

Lorca glanced down at Lalana. Her hands were rotating with contentment and her eyes were fixed on him, awaiting his answer. "A heartbeat. Where to start..."

* * *

They made slower progress in the darkness, but Lorca was determined to get them out of this nightmare of a jungle and back into the shuttle as soon as possible. If there had been any sort of clearing large enough, he would have called Carver to bring the shuttle over and drop it down under cover of darkness. Unfortunately no such clearing existed. At best they might do a hover extraction with a lowered harness. Such an action came with its own set of risks. He could already picture Billingsley managing to bungle some part of it and fall from a height he couldn't safely catch her. Billingsley was a frustrating person but he didn't want her dead.

Their first encounter in the darkness was with some sort of razor-clawed squirrel. It came screeching through the trees and onto Russo's head, attaching itself to Russo's scalp. Morita took one step, wrenched the thing off, threw it into the air, and shot it. A quick examination revealed some scratches on Russo's head, but nothing life-threatening. Morita patched him up with the medkit and they continued.

Next came a lurking _something_ that no one was sure what to compare to, because it rustled around them in the undergrowth but never actually emerged. Something sussing them out, deciding they were too large or too numerous to take on, but returning periodically in the hope one of their number might have straggled off. It stalked them for a good half an hour before finally giving up on the cause. Probably it found another meal source to occupy its attention. (Lorca supposed it could just have been some form of curious herbivore, it just didn't seem likely given everything else around them.)

Another sliggen approached. Since they hunted by vibration, sliggens seemed not to care whether it was day or night. Lorca recognized the sound from before and dispatched it with ease. After they left its carcass, he thought he heard some sort of whooping animal behind them, perhaps alerting others of its kind that there was freshly dead sliggen available. "How many sliggen are there?" he asked Lalana. "Do they have a nest around here?"

"Probably hundreds," said Lalana. "I don't know if they nest, but they are very common."

Mindful that the sliggen was probably being eaten, Lorca decided they ought to take a wide berth around the leskos corpse. There was no telling what kind of scavengers might be disposing of the evidence of their earlier misadventure. Lorca pointed out to Lalana that at least something was probably eating the leskos, but she didn't seem comforted. "I don't want to talk about that," she said, knocking her hands together. He didn't mention it again.

They were making decent time, all things considered. Lorca began to think they were going to make it home free without further incident.

It hit Morita first.

She was on point, combining a sensor data overlay on her night vision glasses with her naturally sharp and attentive instincts to lead them forward with a level of calm certainty and caution that inspired great confidence right up until the moment it didn't. She stopped, whipped her gun upwards, and began turning her head back and forth as if tracking something visually.

A moment later, Russo dropped the equipment case and his hands flew up in front of him and began to shake, as if he were defensively terrified. Billingsley, who was half a step behind him, suddenly screamed, turned on her heel as if to dash for the trees, but predictably tripped on the uneven ground and landed splayed out in the dirt like a fallen scarecrow.

Lorca brought up his rifle, looking for a target in Morita's rapidly switching sightline, but there was nothing there. Lalana seemed similarly confused.

And then Lorca felt it.

It was like icy cold water running down his back. He gasped and released his rifle. The sensation suddenly spilled and wrapped around him, like he had fallen into the arctic ocean, and he could not move. He struggled to breath as his throat seized. He felt icy daggers pierce his shoulders. A stinging sensation burned his eyes.

Lalana jumped onto his back, climbing him like a tree, her hands knotting into the fabric of his jacket at the collar and her legs locking around his torso. She covered his mouth and nose with the broad end of her tail.

It seemed like she was trying to smother him, but when he inhaled, it tasted like a breath of fresh air and his head cleared. The icy sensation fell away. He could hear Lalana whimpering from his backside, a desperate chant: "Shoot, shoot, shoot, please shoot..."

His eyes were still bleary and raw, but he saw a softly glowing shape drift in on the air from the side, like a piece of luminescent cloth floating on the wind. No, more than one something. There were three of them. Five. Eight? He couldn't tell. One descended onto Russo's head and wrapped around it like a turban. Lorca lined up a shot as best he could at the one nearest Morita, blinking away the watery tears in his stinging eyes, and fired.

It wasn't a direct hit, but as the shot illuminated the area, the floating creatures startled and let out a haunting, low warbling sound, stopping in place. Lorca's next two shots hit targets, dropping one to the ground and winging another in such a way that it went spinning off into the trees. The remaining airborne floater began to ascend with puffing motions like a jellyfish, and the one on Russo's head unwrapped itself and followed, but jerkily at irregular angles, like it couldn't quite pick the right direction. Lorca fired at it, but his eyes were even blurrier than before and he missed.

On the ground, Billingsley began crawling away. Falling had gotten her clear of whatever it was that was still paralysing Morita and Russo. An airborne toxin of some sort. Lorca crouched down to the ground as well, elbowing Lalana off his back. The stinging in his eyes lessened with the reduction in altitude. "You all right, chief?"

Billingsley sneezed. "Yes, captain!"

Lorca put his rifle down, wiped the burning tears from his eyes, took a deep breath near the ground, and dashed over to Morita, hooking his arms under her shoulders and dragging her away and downwards. He could feel the exact moment when the paralysis broke and she relaxed. He grabbed another breath at ground level before going for Russo.

They regrouped a short distance away where the air was clear. Russo's scratches from earlier were now purple with irritation. "They went for him first," noted Morita, doing what she could to tend the scrapes. "Smelled his blood, maybe."

"I'm okay, captain," Russo said. "It just stings." But when he tried to stand, he was dizzy and couldn't stay up. Morita injected Russo with an anti-nausea antihistamine and they waited a couple minutes, but the dizziness didn't seem to improve.

"Course of action, sir?"

There were a lot of things people might say about Lorca, but one of the truest was that he improvised very, very well. "Get the ladder, we'll use it as a stretcher."

"I'm really sorry, captain," said Russo.

Lorca clapped a hand on Russo's shoulder and smiled reassuringly. "No need to apologize, lieutenant. It could have happened to any of us."

While Lorca and Morita readied the ladder by attaching the equipment cases to it to condense the number of items needing carrying, Lalana approached Russo. She said something and Russo nodded. She put her tail over his scrapes. "Lalana, what are you doing?" Lorca called out.

"Lelulallen."

She'd killed the leskos with that. Lorca paused with his hand on the ladder. She'd said it was for healing, but... did she know what she was doing? She wasn't exactly an expert on human biology. "Maybe leave the medical care to the doc?"

"I'm done," she said, and withdrew her tail. There were a few patches of dark purple discoloration on her tail corresponding to the scratches on Russo's head. Lalana vibrated and the discolored bits of fur fell off onto the ground. "Some of it was too deep, but it should help."

"It does, thank you."

"I don't suppose this means you can walk now?" asked Lorca.

Russo started to try and stand, but quickly sat down again.

"I only made it sting less," said Lalana. "I think those were something called _pevar-pani_? Margeh and T'rond'n call them mind-eaters. They do not kill their prey, they only render them unconscious, so you should be fine in a few hours."

"Only unconscious," grumbled Lorca, holding the ladder steady while Morita helped Russo onto it. Dizzy was certainly bad enough.

"If your eyes are still bothering you, I can lelulallen them, too," offered Lalana.

"We're gonna give that a hard pass," said Lorca. The last thing he needed was Lalana accidentally blinding someone. "But what you can do is take Mr. Russo's communicator, go up in the trees, and direct us away from any more creatures. How's that sound?"

"Yes, captain!" bubbled Lalana, happy to be of help. Morita showed her how to work the communicator and then she was off.

"Should I have had her doing that the whole time?" Lorca asked Morita.

"Honestly, sir? I'm not sure she should be doing it now, but..." Morita shrugged and took the other side of the ladder with Billingsley.

"If she's attacked, we won't be able to help, and we'll be down our alien," said Russo. He sounded genuinely concerned. Only Billingsley said nothing, her glare burning a hole in the back of Lorca's head as they set out towards the shuttle.

* * *

By the time they reached the outer wall, two more sliggens had been killed, and Russo was recovered enough to walk again. While Russo's recovery meant Lalana could have rejoined them on the ground, she seemed to be taking her scouting duties with the communicator so seriously and enjoying it so much, Lorca let her continue all the way to the wall. At one point, they heard some sort of a violent commotion up in the trees where Lalana was, but she reported all was well, even when Lorca pressed the point, so he let it go. She was supposedly one of the galaxy's toughest prey to hunt. He had to assume that extended to all sorts of hunters.

At least Lalana hadn't used the communicator to turn on them, as Morita had briefly suspected she might. She met them at the wall with the communicator in hand and returned to it Russo, commenting, "I really liked using it. Thank you."

"Sure thing," said Russo, wiping it down as if he concerned about what germs she might have gotten on it. (He'd let her stick her tail on his face, but when it came to communications equipment, Russo didn't mess around.)

They crossed over the wall. Even though they were exhausted and the high-pitched sound was no less painful than before, no one slipped, tripped, or fell. Lorca and Lalana were the last to go up. "Go ahead, captain," said Lalana, waiting for him to proceed. Lorca pursed his lips, suspicious, but went up the ladder, joining Billingsley at the apex. Lalana suddenly bounded up after him, arriving at the top of the wall a mere moment after he did, then jumped down while he was busy collapsing the back half of the ladder.

It struck him while he was coming down the other side that there were three things bothering him about Lalana's behavior. First, that she had been first up and onto every climbable object they had encountered until now. Second, that she wasn't moving when anyone was looking directly at her. Third, that she was keeping herself facing them at all times.

While Billingsley reset the energy barrier, Lorca ordered Morita and Russo to take the communications case back to the shuttle. He didn't have to ask twice; Morita and Russo were all too happy to get away from the annoying sound of the fence.

Despite the lingering risk that Billingsley would fall coming down (but certain she had embarrassed herself sufficiently to take steps to avoid it), Lorca took the medkit and gestured for Lalana to join him away from the wall. She fell into step behind him rather than alongside, further confirming his suspicion, and stood with her tail against the ground once they were clear of the piercing tone.

He put his hands on his hip and raised his eyebrows, fixing her with the Look. "All right, what's wrong with you?"

"What do you mean?"

"You know exactly what I mean. Turn around."

Her knuckles began knocking.

"Turn. Around."

She took a short, twisting step, half-turning left. Her right side looked perfectly fine.

"Lalana!" he barked impatiently.

"It's fine, really," she said, but turned the rest of the way, leaning heavily on her tail to do so. A large patch of fur on the rear side of her left haunch was flattened, the strands tautly hooked together.

"If I have to ask one more time," he warned her.

The tendrils of her fur delicately pulled apart to reveal a large, gaping hole at least two inches wide, and rather deep.

"The hell," he said, dropping down for a closer look, and shone the light from his rifle inside. It was an absolutely massive gash. The interior walls of the wound were lined with ghostly little tendrils, like cobwebs, that seemed to be trying to stretch to fill the area, but not quite succeeding. His hand hovered near the gash, but he didn't touch it. "Doesn't that hurt?"

"No," she said nonchalantly. "It just keeps pulling apart when I move, so I cannot get it properly _alalalu_."

"Alu... alalu..."

She hooked her fingers together in illustration. "Ah-lah-luh-lu. When two strands come together and connect."

"Knit, maybe," he offered. Stitched, knotted, or woven might have been just as appropriate. He opened the medkit and wondered what the best course of treatment was. Probably leaving the medicine to Dr. Ek'Ez, as he had suggested she do earlier with Russo, but he couldn't leave a giant gaping wound unattended for the several hours it would take them to return to the Triton. At least it didn't seem to be life-threatening. "I guess I can staple it."

"Staple?"

"This is why we should leave your translator on 'full,'" he admonished her, brandishing the medical stapler. "We just put this over the gash, and..." He popped his lips while tapping his finger against the trigger without pulling it. "Staple goes in, closes it up."

Using the word "staple" to define the act of stapling was not entirely helpful, but Lalana seemed the understand and responded with enthusiasm to the idea. "Excellent!"

There were three anesthetics in the kit. It was probably a bad idea to try and use any of them without knowing which might be safe. "This'll hurt."

"No it won't. I am quite certain there isn't anything you could do which could cause me pain, captain. Physically, in any event. Certainly, there are other capacities in which intelligent creatures can hurt each other..."

She had said the wound didn't hurt. Still. "Stop talking, and don't move." He put one hand firmly around the wound, pressing the gash closed, and popped a staple into place. Lalana didn't flinch. Her flesh had a vaguely jellylike feel to it. He added another staple, and a third, which was probably overkill, but she had said the wound kept popping open when she moved, so it seemed prudent to reinforce it. He sat back and admired his handiwork.

"Those are very nice," she commented. "Sterile! Can you put some here, here, here, here, and here?" Her fur parted in five spots along the bulge in her haunch where the wound was.

Lorca considered the request. The staples were supposed to be used to seal the outside of a wound. They weren't particularly deep and it seemed unlikely they would penetrate far enough to seal the wound internally. He said as much. "Please, captain?" She looked at him with her enormous eyes, creepy as they were in the darkness.

On the one hand, this was a potentially frivolous misuse of medical supplies and an unnecessary additional procedure that might merit a lecture attempt from Dr. Ek'Ez. On the other, she had asked nicely, and the staples were sterile and unlikely to do anything beyond damage her skin cosmetically. "Sure, what the hell."

By the time he got to the fourth spot, he noticed something strange was happening. The first staple was disappearing into her skin, pushed in by the surrounding tendrils of her fur, and the second.

"Captain?"

"Yeah." He stopped staring and popped in the last two staples in quick succession. "You're all set."

She pressed her tail over the spot, compressing the area. "Much better. They aren't melting."

That seemed worth a question, but he had a more pressing thought on his mind. He returned the stapler to the medkit and sat back on the ground so they were speaking at eye level, one leg up, elbow resting on his knee. "Mind telling me what happened?"

"I collided with a Dartaran wasp. I was jumping where it was flying, and I did not see it until it was too late to avoid. They are... burrowing wasps. Usually into trees. When I hit it, it tried to burrow into me, according to its instinct. It was very effective at this."

The corner of his mouth twitched downward. It was a lot of information that failed to address the main problem at hand. "Why didn't you _say_ anything?"

"It was such a big deal when Russo was hurt, I didn't want to inconvenience you, and... I did not want you to think I could not handle myself after I told you I could."

Lorca considered that carefully, eyes narrowing. "If you were a member of my crew, I'd have busted you back down to ensign for this."

"Because I was hurt? Then, will Russo...?"

"Because you lied to me." He let that sit in the air a moment. "I asked you, point blank, is everything all right up there, and you said it was. I asked you _twice_. And what, you didn't trust me enough to tell me the truth?"

Her hands began knocking. "Captain, I—"

"Ah," he stopped her, finger raised. "I am risking everything to help you and your people. Now I think it's a good cause, but if you don't trust me enough to tell me when something happens that might jeopardize the safety of anyone involved, yourself included, we are not going to get very far, and you can go find yourself another Starfleet captain."

All the Southern drawl in the universe couldn't soften the blow of this lecture. Lalana turned her head away. "Yes, captain." Her tail shifted from her haunch to her eyes, a now-familiar move of distress.

"Now hold on, don't do that," he said with mild alarm. "I'm not trying to make you feel bad, Lalana. I just need you to understand: you do not make the decisions here, I do. And in order for me to do that effectively, you have to keep me informed so we don't have a repeat of this mistake. That's not a problem for you, is it?" It wasn't really a question so much as a statement of her general tendency to overshare details.

He tail shifted, her leftmost three pupils peeking out. "Then you are not mad at me?"

Truthfully, he was a little angry, but it was very far down on the list of his feelings about the situation. She wasn't a member of the crew, didn't know much about Starfleet, and had been trying to be considerate, albeit in an idiotic way that could have turned out very badly for all concerned and had ended up being mildly inconvenient to him personally.

He took a chance. "Oh, I'm mad, all right. Absolutely, positively furious. Steam out the ears and everything. Any second now, my head'll explode like a volcano, killing us both. Probably take half the moon out, too." She looked, but there was no steam, no volcano, only a very telling smirk. Her tongue clicked tentatively. Emboldened, he went on, "In fact, I'm so angry, I think I'll conscript you. How's the rank of lieutenant sound? No, lieutenant commander. Hell, let's make it a full commander. Commander Lalana, welcome to Starfleet, and you're being demoted."

The trickle of tongue clicks turned into a explosion of clicks. She thumped her tail against the ground for good measure.

"Demoted! Captain, no!" she managed gleefully through her laughter.

"Ensign Lalana! You'll be scrubbing plasma conduits with a toothbrush for the next month. And no cheating and using your tail. And if I don't—"

Someone coughed. Lorca whipped his head around, startled. "Billingsley! Goddamnit, how long have you been standing there!" Between the faint buzz of the wall and the conversation, he hadn't heard her approach. Lalana might have mentioned the engineer's approach. (In fact, she had tried, but he'd cut her off.)

Billingsley grimaced. "Sir. Is there any answer to that question you'll like?"

Lorca grabbed the medkit and stood up. "Probably not, chief." But he made her tell him anyway.


	11. The Cure for What Ails

A/N: I now go out on a limb, because there's only so much you can do with the amount of character background given in the show so far, but I hope you'll agree the story point is worth the risk of any potential contradiction down the line.

* * *

Back on the shuttle, Carver had a hot thermos of coffee ready, strong and black and with a full and rich aroma that smelled like it must have come from her own private reserve, because the coffee in the ship's stores never smelled like this. Carver's family was Brazilian, and as he recalled from her file, coffee was to them what fortune cookies had once been to his ancestors.

"Lt. Carver, you truly are a treasure. How you ended up on the Triton instead of a ship that deserves you, I'll never know."

Carver flashed her pearly whites. "Just good luck, sir."

He settled down in the shuttle's rear, cup in hand. Lalana curled up on the seat next to him, tail over her eyes to sleep. He closed his eyes, too, but more as an excuse to savor the coffee's aroma, though he couldn't deny he was exhausted.

Someone sat down on his other side. He opened his eyes. Morita. She seemed like she wanted to say something. "Yes?" he prompted, sipping his coffee patiently. It was smooth-tasting, slightly nutty, not at all bitter. He would have preferred a little more acidic bite, actually. There was something to be said for really bad coffee at the tail end of a long day.

"Captain, it's not my intent to question you or your command."

Which meant she had a question. He inclined his head for her to continue and took another sip.

"When we went inside the house, what was the plan if we were caught?"

There was no simple answer to that question because there had been no one, single plan for that scenario.

There had been several.

If T'rond'n had found them in the bathroom, for instance, Lorca would have disabled or taken him hostage, then leveraged that to compel one or both of the Dartarans to contact the lului merchants on their behalf, giving them a much more direct path towards their end goal of locating Luluan.

In fact, that exact possibility was why Lorca had decided to go in while the Dartarans were awake in the first place: some primal part of him wanted to see what outcome fortune would dictate, the risky shortcut or the plan he'd set out to achieve.

Another, larger, equally primal part of him wanted to prove his greatest conceit.

Lorca had not been a tremendously profuse reader as a child. He was generously described as rambunctious, preferring any manner of physical pursuit to sitting down with a book in hand, and running around with your nose in a book was generally a surefire way to bust open said nose, which he knew from experience.

Despite this, he did enjoy books and reading, one book in particular. It was the book his mother had read him to sleep with as a child. A worn, old hardcover copy of Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, predating the Eugenics Wars.

It wasn't a particularly rare or well-kept copy. When he was seven or eight years old, he had torn the cover halfway off in a minor climbing incident and his mother had brought him along to a bookbinder to assess the damage. As bookbinding was a "dying art" largely relegated to modern hobbyists, finding a true professional had taken them to one of those vanishing corners of the Earth where currency was still used. The man had taken one look at the book, informed them it would cost many times more than the value of the book to repair it, and recommended replacing it instead. Lorca's mother had insisted on the repairs all the same.

He still remembered the way she stroked his hair as she read, the breathy whisper as she spoke into life the many wonders of the vast, unexplored frontier that was the ocean in 1866, and the words she'd said when he asked if one day he'd get to explore the oceans, too.

"Oh, hon," she had laughed. "There isn't anything left to explore in the oceans. They've already explored it all, before you were even born."

He'd been young enough that his response to this information was to break out in distraught wailing. She'd laughed again, but gently as she brushed the tears from his eyes.

"That's the ocean now, up there." She pointed out the window to the stars. "Look. It's so deep, it's inky black, and it's full of tiny, shining fish." From that moment on, the sky became the ocean, and he imagined the Nautilus traveling through that starry sea, and he looked up every night as she read to him and saw the words play out against the starlit sky, and dreamed of that waiting adventure.

The book was in his quarters at this very moment, sitting beside his bed, still bearing the marks of the repairs to its faded antique cover.

Inside that precious tome, tucked between pages fifty and fifty-one, lay a single slip of paper, barely the size of a pinky finger. It was a fortune he'd opened when he was only fifteen. By that time, he'd already started counting the days until he'd be able to realize his dream of sailing the starry ocean on a ship all his own, and he hadn't needed any encouragement, but the fortune had meant something to him all the same.

It read in tiny, precise black print, "You make your own fortune."

It was the sort of fortune cookie makers intended to be taken tongue in cheek, but that didn't change the potential those five words represented.

Which brought him back to the Dartarans and the risk he had taken in entering their home. He could have waited until they were asleep, gone the most cautious route, risked nothing and played it safe. Instead, he'd chosen a path that let fate enter the picture and affect the outcome.

And then he'd taken that same fate into his own hands and bent it to his own purposes through a combination of sheer intellect, training, and force of will.

Which was why he knew that, no matter how things had played out down on that moon, he would have found a way to complete his mission goals. There were plenty of ways he might have convinced Margeh and T'rond'n to help, too. Lalana might know things they would not want made public which could be used to blackmail them into compliance or silence. Elements of their business practices might be exposed to their financial detriment and potential ruin. As they were partners in business as well as life, one of them potentially had a trigger point at which he or she would fall into line to protect the other.

Supposing they were unmoved by blackmail or coercion. They had proven themselves to be rather stubborn when it came to their shuttle, after all. Well, then they could be brought back to the Triton and detained until the end of the mission. The ramifications with Starfleet would have been tremendously bad, but potentially weatherable. Successfully saving a whole planet of pre-warp aliens would certainly be a rousing factor in any defense.

He'd even had a contingency if one or both of the Dartarans had ended up dead. There was a perfectly good leskos corpse in the woods. Who's to say the Dartarans didn't meet an untimely end pursuing their favorite pastime in their forest of horrors?

It was a multi-layered tree of possibilities and outcomes, and Lorca had mapped enough of them to be able to say that no matter how things turned out, he would have been ready to march ahead with something plausibly workable.

The sum totality of it all was that he had more than he ever could or would say in explanation. The Wizard only ruled Oz so long as no one looked behind the curtain.

He closed his eyes and inhaled deeply from his cup. There was another set of fortune cookies stashed in here, and he wouldn't mind having one to go with his coffee, but for once he didn't feel like getting up. "Apologies, Reiko, but I'm gonna use my prerogative as captain not to answer. You're just gonna have to trust that there was a plan, but the less said about it, the better."

Morita seemed like she had expected as much. "Understood."

He smirked. "Try not to hold it against me."

"Permission to speak freely, sir?" She was professional to the point that, even when he addressed her by her given name, she didn't assume she had that freedom already. (Unlike Billingsley, who seemed to assume she was allowed to speak her mind whether anyone said she could or not. Maybe she felt she still had a blanket permission to speak freely from some previous granting of the right, as if such permissions never expired.)

"Go."

"I'm glad it didn't come to whatever it was. We're already off the books, I'd rather not break any more regulations."

Lorca squinted at her. "Have we broken any regulations?"

She looked surprised. "Trespassing and installing an unauthorized device on private property."

"I have no idea what you're talking about, chief."

She realized what he was doing and half-rolled her eyes in beleaguered amusement. The "if a tree falls in a forest and no one's there to hear it, it didn't make a sound" defense. Practical, albeit rather Machiavellian. "Sir," she said, with the mildest edge of disapproval. "What about the evidence?"

Lorca just shrugged casually and said in low, conspiratorial tone, "What evidence?"

Morita ran over their mission so far in her mind. The communications hijacker was evidence, all right, but it was something they'd confiscated from a pirate, contained no Starfleet components, and depending on how often and thoroughly the Dartarans checked their home data center, it might be months before they even noticed it was there and then they'd be unable to prove when it was installed. Fingerprints and DNA, maybe, but unless the Dartarans figured out what had happened, there would be no reason to check for those, and Russo had carefully wiped all the crucial surfaces down. There wasn't even any evidence that they had a live lului, because the evidence indicated Lalana was dead.

It reminded her of something she'd heard at the Academy. "Professor Rokodo's midterm."

He hadn't heard or thought about that name in a long time. "Once again, I am at a loss."

Rokodo taught one of the basic prerequisite starship maintenance classes that no one really liked, not even the most passionate and enthusiastic ship geeks. If rumor was to be believed, a second-year cadet by the name of Gabriel Lorca and some compatriots, faced with the prospect of less than satisfactory scores, had derailed the midterm by executing a rather vicious prank involving a hazardous leak in the testing area. Investigation and expulsion might have been imminent save for the fact that when the hazard team arrived, no leak could be found, despite Rokodo's insistence that the leak had in fact occurred, and he was a certifiable expert in the field, so he would know.

Morita smiled. "Because you didn't do it or because you didn't get caught?"

"Yes," said Lorca, not identifying which. He exhaled heavily and his eyes fluttered closed, then snapped open, as if he might have started to fall asleep and stopped himself. "When you say 'off the books'... The books are the regulations." It sounded like the first part of a point, but no second part was forthcoming. Despite the hot caffeine infusion, he was starting to crash. "I do mostly follow the rules," he said after a moment.

"You do, sir."

"But the captain has to use his own discretion. The people who write the regs aren't out here. They're back, safe and comfy, in Starfleet command." There was another considerable pause. "And sometimes you have to take a risk. Especially when there's a payoff, and it's for a good cause. That's why we went in when we did."

Morita could see this conversation wasn't going to last much longer, but wanted to get what she could while she could from the captain. "What was the payoff?"

Lorca's smile was tired but self-satisfied. "The less time spent on that moon, the better."

There was no arguing with that. Morita leaned forward and looked across Lorca at Lalana. She didn't disagree about the good cause at this point, either. "Well put. Thank you, sir."

"Anytime, chief." Morita returned to the other side of the shuttle to check on Russo's scrapes again and Lorca closed his eyes.

He wasn't aware exactly when he fell asleep, or what happened the half-cup of coffee he didn't finish drinking, but he dreamed about tiny starry fish in an inky-black sky.

* * *

He awoke refreshed after a couple hours rest, just in time for their return to the Triton, and felt miles better, though by this point, no amount of rest on a shuttle was going to salvage the appearance of the away team. Dirty, rumpled clothes, scrapes, bruises, mussed hair, and haggard faces marked them as survivors of an arduous ordeal. Only Carver, who had spent the whole mission in the shuttle on standby, looked halfway decent, and even she was beginning to hit her coffee limit. Not that her piloting showed it.

As they approached, Lalana offered her folded up tail to Lorca, a gesture he didn't immediately understand until she tugged his hand out, palm out.

She dropped eight staples into his palm. "I am done with these now. Thank you again."

Lorca stared at the staples, mindful that all of them had been embedded to some degree in her body. He opened his mouth, inhaled with the intent of saying something, then stopped. The situation was what it was. "You're welcome," he lied, and dropped the staples onto the seat so someone in maintenance could worry about disposing of them. He surreptitiously eyed her haunch for any sign of the wound that had been there, but saw none, and there was no indication when she moved that she had ever been wounded.

Benford was waiting for their arrival, flanked by a security officer. He was a sight for sore eyes in the literal as well as figurative sense. "Welcome back, captain!" Benford said, beaming. His relief at having everyone safely back on board was palpable.

"Good to be back, Commander," replied Lorca as he disembarked from the shuttle, Lalana a step behind him.

"And Miss Lalana, lovely to see you, too."

"Commander Benford," replied Lalana graciously.

Of course, Benford was there with security for a reason. "Dr. Ek'Ez would like you to come to sickbay if you don't mind."

"Why?" she asked.

"Just the same old 'can't scan for parasites' routine."

"I really don't have parasites," said Lalana, looking to Lorca for guidance.

"You should let the doc check your wound," he said.

"That is not necessary, it is already fixed."

"Let the doc do his thing," said Lorca, "or I'll never hear the end of it."

Lalana let out a sort of breathy trill Lorca hadn't heard before, but which really felt like annoyance, and complied. She and Russo went with Benford.

Morita and Carver stood waiting for orders. "Excellent work, both of you. Get some rest. Dismissed."

"Aye, captain!" saluted Carver, with her trademark smile. She whirled on her foot and headed away with the others.

Billingsley didn't come out with the others, instead emerging a moment later pulling one of the gear crates from the shuttle. Lorca stared at her with vague disgust. "Billingsley! Leave that for someone else. You're dismissed."

She didn't listen, continuing to drag the crate down the ramp towards Lorca. He sighed at her stubbornness and took the crate's other end.

It was much easier carrying it between the two of them. Despite her clumsiness in regular gravity, Billingsley was no slouch and stronger than she looked, so they split the burden of the crate almost evenly. Almost. Both seemed to be trying to take the brunt of its weight. _Competing right to the last_ , thought Lorca.

They deposited the crate near the shuttlebay doors. Billingsley pushed it against the wall with an angry shove of her foot. Lorca watched disapprovingly. "Watch it, chief," he warned.

She stood there, staring at the crate, her hands balled into fists. Then her hands relaxed. "I hate you," she said at last.

"I know." They stood there a moment more, Billingsley glowering while Lorca regarded her. He checked his watch, which still had Tederek local time displayed. It would be at least another hour or two before it was time to implement the next part of the plan. "Join me for a drink?"

* * *

Afterwards, she sat up, her hair hanging loosely about her shoulders and a twist of sheets around her waist and he noticed something.

She was marked with tiny brown dots like stars in a constellation, perfectly mirrored on both sides of her body at every major joint, as if she were Orion come to life from the sky.

With stubborn reluctance, she explained that they were measurement tattoos, placed on her at a young age so her parents could monitor the progress of the medical intervention taken to counteract the effects of high gravity on her developing skeletal structure. Most people had slight variances between the two halves of their body - one leg slightly longer than the other - but in Billingsley's case, her arms and legs were perfectly symmetrical by design, and she had ten years of precise medical notations to prove it.

"You could have them removed," he noted, running his thumb over the dot on her left shoulder. If you didn't know what the dots were or that they were paired on each side, they could be mistaken for large freckles or small moles.

His suggestion was met with silence. Billingsley was too practical a person for that kind of vain frivolity, and while her tattoos did not feature any image or text communicating their purpose, they were nevertheless as much a reflection of her history as any other tattoo.

Lorca traced his index finger from the dot on her shoulder to the dot on her elbow to the dot on her wrist, then folded his hand into hers. The long thinness of her hands was a side effect of the growth factors used to elongate her limbs. He drew her hand to his lips and kissed it. She snorted and pulled her hand away. "Don't get sentimental on me."

He grinned. "Never," he promised. "And don't you, either. That's an order."

She groaned and rolled her eyes. It wasn't a real order, obviously, but it did underscore the problem at the foundation of this encounter. On top of everything else.

Normally, his partners were slightly less annoyed with him after they were done, but this was Billingsley. Annoyed seemed to be her default setting. "We don't have a problem, do we?"

"No. _Sir_."

"Sar- _ah!_ " he groaned in mild chastisement. Wait, she didn't think‒ He sat up suddenly. "This doesn't change anything."

He'd mistaken her response for more antagonistic than she'd intended. "So I don't get a repeat?"

He carefully considered her face and body language. "Do you want a repeat?"

Her shoulders shrugged and her eyes feigned disinterest. "I'm not saying no." She sniffed in sudden amusement. "At least you gave me more than a choice than I had taking this assignment."

It seemed like there was a story there. "How's that?"

She sighed. "I'm supposed to be on Spacedock. If that engineer hadn't gotten kicked out of Starfleet during the ship's last refit..."

He knew that the engineer who had occupied Sarah's position prior had been discharged from Starfleet for behavioral problems, but he'd always assumed Billingsley had taken the job because she wanted it. He said as much.

"They needed someone who was up to speed on the Triton's systems. I was in charge of the refit. So..."

He suddenly realized exactly how much she didn't want to be there. "You can transfer out."

She shrugged. "No starbases have any good engineering posts open. They always go to someone else. Triton isn't exactly a resume-builder."

That annoyed him. No one had ever asked to be assigned to the Triton, but it was still his ship, and he felt he'd done an exemplary job of restoring the ship's reputation to something approaching esteem since taking command. And while it had previously been known as a terrible posting, it _was_ a temporary one. The ship only had four more months until it was decommissioned. This entire assignment was a proving ground. Didn't Billingsley see that?

He might have said any or all of this to her. He settled for a brief, "Four months."

She hummed slightly. "Four months," she repeated.

And in that time, he intended to show Starfleet just what their newly minted captain was made of.


	12. Affairs of the Heartless

"Testing one, two, three. Huh. Well, that's creepy."

"I don't know, I think it's an improvement."

Lorca fixed Benford with a look. They were in the ready room running a final test of the fake Peter Bhandary: a live-rendered image of Bhandary mapped on top of Lorca's expressions and movements, with fake kelbonite interference to mask any imperfections. Benford grinned back at Lorca. "You haven't looked that good in, well, ever!"

Lorca pointed at the display and the image in the display pointed right back. "You really think this asshole looks better than I do? And remember, I am your captain."

"Well, when you put it that way, he looks ten times as good as you."

"Jack!" said Lorca, exasperated but laughing.

Benford laughed, too. "If you didn't know how good-looking you were, the universe would be a much better place."

It was a blatant lie. It had to be, because Benford had used Lorca's good looks to his own advantage in various bars over the years before he'd gotten married. "I didn't know you found me attractive," Lorca shot back.

Benford raised an eyebrow. "Ah, I didn't say that. I think what I said was you find yourself attractive? And that is a dangerous thing."

Lorca snorted. There was nothing to be gained by arguing the point. "All right, let's turn on the audio filter." He cleared his throat.

"Ready when you are."

"Jack Benford is the worst." As Lorca spoke these words aloud, the computer rendered the speech into a tone and pitch matching Bhandary's voiceprint just a smidge of a second behind real-time, so it sounded like two people saying the exact same thing at the same rate in near-unison. It was, for Lorca at least, markedly disconcerting hearing another voice at virtually the same time as his own. He specifically chose a few unusual test sentences to push the limits of the speech algorithm. "Rubber baby buggy bumpers. This fortune cookie intentionally left blank. Not for all the horses in Andalusia."

"Now _that's_ creepy," declared Benford, muting the audio. "But it's working. You want to go over any more lines?" They'd spent much of the past ninety minutes running through various conversational scenarios in preparation for the main event.

"Nope. Let's get Lalana up here and go." Benford sent the summons and double-checked everything one more time.

While he waited for Lalana's arrival, Lorca ran his hand through his hair and was annoyed to see Bhandary's image do the same. Luckily he wouldn't be looking at the image during the actual transmission, because Bhandary's smug face still irked him. He scrunched up his own face and tried to make it look like Bhandary was crying.

An incoming commlink interrupted this diversion. It was Ek'Ez. "Yes, doctor?"

"Captain, I have discovered the most amazing thing about lului!"

"Is it an emergency?"

"I—no, captain. Not an emergency."

Lalana arrived with her security escort. Lorca motioned for her to wait and the escort stepped outside. "Is it anything that will change in the next ten minutes? Or that I need to know right now?"

Ek'Ez paused. "No. It is nothing of the sort."

"Then I'll talk to you again in ten minutes." He terminated the comm link.

"Captain!" said Lalana cheerfully. "I am so happy to be able to help you."

"Yep," said Lorca, slipping in the earpieces that would let them pass him any pertinent information in a manner that wouldn't distract him from the task at hand. Lalana wasn't, strictly speaking, necessary to this part of the plan, but on the off chance something came up, it was better she be present to provide her insight into the Dartarans on demand, and if nothing else, Lorca knew she'd be an appreciative audience.

Benford went over the procedure for the transmission one more time with Lalana. Lorca stared into the monitor and smiled. Here went nothing, do or die. "Initiate transmission."

The answer wasn't immediate, but it came. T'rond'n's face appeared onscreen. Because they were copying Bhandary's previous transmission codes from the Dartarans' archives, T'rond'n expected exactly what he saw: Peter Bhandary, albeit with significant visual interference.

Lorca affected a tone he thought fit the conceited persona of a smarmy socialite like Bhandary. It came out like a bad cross between a California valley girl and a mimicry of foppish, old school British aristocracy, with a smattering of sycophantic insincerity thrown in on top for good measure. Of course, the computer made it sound like Bhandary, but the emotion and cadence of the performance came through to add that extra layer of scumbag. "T'rond'n! You're alive! I'm so glad to see you! When I heard what happened... "

"Peter," said T'rond'n, apparently all the greeting Lorca was going to get. "This is unexpected."

"I heard Starfleet destroyed your ship!" The words had been carefully chosen to convince the Dartarans of the impetus for Bhandary's contact, and having the facts of the matter appear diluted through a small game of interstellar telephone gave it the ring of truth. It wouldn't do to have Bhandary seem too well-informed and make the conversation smell like the setup it actually was. "Is Margeh...?"

"Margeh is here. We were not on the ship that was destroyed."

"Thank goodness. Who was on it?"

T'rond'n shifted but did not immediately answer. Margeh came into view. "A thief," she said, appraising the interference on the transmission. "Where are you?"

Lorca wouldn't have minded trying the whole conversation on T'rond'n, but luck wasn't with him. From everything he knew about the couple, Margeh was the savvier of the two, and he would have to tread carefully to get this conversation where he needed it to go. Of course, that was why he'd insisted on doing it himself. "Sorry about the picture quality. I'm at a kelbonite mine. In fact, if you're in the market for any..."

"No, thank you, Peter," said T'rond'n, gruffly but not angrily.

Lorca switched right back to the chase. "So the thief stole your ship?"

Margeh hissed angrily. "Our lului was stolen. The ship was... circumstantial."

Lorca was pleasantly surprised to have Margeh come out and say it. He'd had four other lines prepped to convince her to reveal the fact, and now that he didn't have to use them, he could jump right into the next part. "The lului? Really? Did you get it back at least?"

"No," said T'rond'n, in something like a sigh. "She was on the ship that was destroyed."

"No! Oh, that's a shame." Lorca's voice practically oozed concern. It was maybe a tad overwrought, but Dartarans were notoriously stoic and tended to think of humans as emotional, and Lorca knew Bhandary was an emotional enough person to stay up late crying, so may as well play up to their expectations. "It was such a charming creature. The way it changed colors on command... Really impressive." Lorca imagined Lalana was probably having a good laugh right now. Of course, Margeh was not so kindly disposed towards her former pet at this point, since the thief and the stolen goods were one and the same. "Will you get another one?"

"Unlikely."

Minor setback, but expected. Margeh had to be led to the idea in such a way that it felt like her own. She was almost a harder nut to crack than Billingsley. (Lorca wondered if Margeh might be susceptible to the same sort of icebreaker he'd applied in the chief engineer's case. Probably not.) "That's right, I remember, you said they were almost impossible to catch. Such a shame. You probably won't get that lucky again."

Margeh jerked her head in affront. There it was. "Luck had nothing to do with it," she said. "Hunting is about skill, preparation, patience, and knowledge of your prey. Luck is for amateurs."

"Of course, you're right, my apologies. I'm sure no one knows more about lului than you at this point." _Ha._ "You could probably catch as many as you wanted. At the end of the day, you don't need any proof. You know you had a lului, and that's all that matters. No one can take that accomplishment away from you. And if anyone ever doubts it, you can call me, and I'll set the record straight." He smiled.

Most people could have found comfort in that sentiment, but from everything Lorca had heard and read about Margeh, she was not most people.

As a general rule, Dartaran society split certain certain roles down gender lines, as many human societies once had in the past. The difference was that the Dartaran split persisted into the present day. Some sociologists theorized that it did so because while the two genders were seen as fundamentally different, they were both equally important and present in Dartar's overall political, societal, and historic landscape. Co-dominance, Starfleet's file called it. A subtle but distinct difference from true egality.

The split was this: male Dartarans mostly handled logistics, production, and trade, while females governed sciences, culture, and spirituality. They were called the Hand and the Head in Dartaran philosophy respectively. Starfleet's sociological profile included a foundational Dartaran axiom, "Without the Hand, the Head cannot act, and without the Head, the Hand has nothing to do." (It was additionally worth noting that Dartaran culture was slightly more monolithic than most, as Dartar featured but a single supercontinent that had unified under the Head and Hand banner around the time that Caesar walked the Earth.)

It wasn't a hard rule, and there were plenty of figures in Dartaran history who defied these gender norms, but that didn't mean there wasn't pushback when someone did break the mold, simply because it was seen as abnormal.

As a successful merchant, Margeh had broken that mold and had the chip on her shoulder to match. Her entire life, she had been motivated by the need to prove herself to everyone around her, and this still held true today. To doubly undercut something she had accomplished by suggesting she needed a human male to back her up on it as proof...

"Anyway, I've taken up enough of your time. I'm just so glad you're both safe. Let me know if you're in the market for a new ship. I've got a line on some Vulcan shuttles. They're not cheap, but they're very fast." Nice little dig at the slow speed of Margeh and T'rond'n's transports, just in case they still weren't feeling inadequate enough to motivate Margeh to compensate.

"Yes," said Margeh softly, her mind clearly elsewhere.

"Thank you, Peter," said T'rond'n, almost mechanically, and the transmission terminated.

Lorca removed the earpieces and turned around. Benford had his padd under his arm and was clapping slowly. "I don't know that they took the bait, but..."

"It really looked like you were Peter Bhandary!" said Lalana excitedly, hands rotating.

"Don't say that," groaned Lorca. If he never had to see Bhandary's face again, it would be a day too soon.

Her hands paused. "Why? Was that not the point?"

"Yes, but..."

Benford snorted and explained, "He thinks his face is much better looking than Bhandary's is." The reveal was his little way of getting back at Lorca .

"Oh, without doubt!" agreed Lalana, earnestly and without hesitation. "Your face is the best."

Lorca's disgruntled glare at Benford was replaced by a look of surprise and delight. "Look at that, even Lalana agrees."

"How do you mean?" asked Benford suspiciously, wondering how a lului could possibly gauge human attractiveness when the two species were so incredibly different.

"I have noticed that humans do not express with movements very much, because you don't have tails and fur, so instead you put the things that you feel on your faces. And you have the most things of any human on your face."

The sentence was so ridiculous, Lorca's shoulders shook with silent laughter and he covered his face with his hand. He had the most things on his face? What did that even... Perceiving her comment had made Lorca happy, Lalana resumed rotating her hands.

"I think you've got that backwards," Benford said, thinking lului probably expressed so many emotions with their hands and tails because their faces were largely incapable of expression. They were basically two eyes and a mouth that switched between an upside-down V shape when closed and a diamond when open. They could not smile, squint, or even blink. "But more importantly, captain, what about Margeh and T'rond'n?

"What about them?" His tone was jovial, even nonchalant.

"Their response was a little... lackluster, maybe?"

Lorca snorted with amusement. "Tell me, Jack. You in a gambling mood?"

Benford had learned a long time ago: never, ever bet against Gabriel Lorca. "I guess you saw something I didn't!"

 _Probably several things_ , thought Lorca, but said diplomatically, "If they haven't made their overture by the end of the day, we'll call it a bust. But they will. Now, if you'll give me the room... and sorry I didn't end up needing you, Lalana, but you can never be too prepared for a curveball."

"Oh, that is no trouble, captain, it was my pleasure. But what is a 'curveball' and how do we 'give you' the..." Lalana began saying, but Benford ushered her out.

Lorca glanced past his reflection in the window and drummed his fingers, expression blank. He also needed to check in with Dr. Ek'Ez. He may as well do that first, in case it was something worth reporting to Starfleet. He took a moment to crack a cookie as a quick snack, then opened a visual comm line to sickbay. "Dr. Ek'Ez, you had something to report?"

"Captain!" Though it had been several minutes now, Ek'Ez's excitement and enthusiasm had not waned one bit. "In my most recent battery of tests, I have discovered the most amazing thing!"

Lorca hadn't given Ek'Ez permission to run any tests. He hadn't forbidden it, but he hadn't approved it, either. "I thought you were just running decon."

"Well, yes, captain, but Lalana kept insisting it was not necessary, and once I determined the reason she thought this, it merited scientific exploration."

"Well don't leave me in suspense, doctor," said Lorca. Trying to get succinct answers out of Ek'Ez verbally was every bit as hard as trying to parse his rambly, meandering written reports.

"Captain, Lalana is, and I apologize for the inadequacies of language in communicating this, but she is a many-celled organism."

Lorca blinked slowly and took a breath. Almost all forms of life were cellular in origin, with the higher forms being comprised of trillions and trillions of cells. "Anything else?"

"Ah, I am not explaining it right. She is many cells unified into a single, coherent organism." This cleared absolutely nothing up. "She is cells!" Lorca began to wonder if this was some sort of mental breakdown. Ek'Ez turned his head. "Sam! Will you please come and explain this?"

Li's face came into view, her dark eyes staring with disturbing lifelessness at Lorca. "She _is_ the cells, captain," said Li. It was a subtle difference of a single word, but it was enough of a difference that Lorca realized what Ek'Ez was trying to say. Li further clarified, "Individually and collectively."

"Are you saying she's a trillion self-aware cells?" he attempted.

"Not quite! Yes, in that she is aware of herself on a cellular level, and that all her cells are part of a neural network, and no, in that there is what could be described as a central neural structure which is the core of her consciousness... Allow me to back up a moment." Ek'Ez blinked his eyes repeatedly, something he did when he was clearing his mind. Lorca winced, expecting this would get worse before it got better.

"In most species, cells are differentiated into tissue types, and form unique biological structures, which we call organs."

Lorca wanted to smack Ek'Ez. "They do teach biology at the Academy," he deadpanned. "Even to meatheads."

"Yes, of course, I apologize. I simply want to make sure the distinction here is clear. While Lalana possesses several differentiated tissue structures — her eyes, for example, and bone structure, and her central neural structure — the majority of her tissues are not differentiated. She does not have blood, or a heart, or a liver, or even what you and I would call a stomach. Rather, her body is made up of a mass of multipurpose, unspecialized — or perhaps more accurately, multi-specialized — cells which perform all the basic biological functions at once, configured as an interlocking lattice of cells and operating as a diffuse network transmitting nutrients and information through connections of the cellular membrane!"

There was an accompanying graphic showing a lului cell and the pipelike structures on the cell's outer membrane which connected to other, identical cells with the same features.

Lorca knew Lalana had no heartbeat from their conversation on the Tederek moon, and had seen firsthand the lack of blood in the wound on her leg, but hadn't put those two facts together until now. She was literally heartless.

"It's like she's made up of stem cells," offered Dr. Li from off-screen. (Lorca wished she would just decide if she wanted to be in this conversation or not, and behave accordingly.)

"Yes, they do have a progenitive nature. The medical implications, captain!"

The medical implications were what, exactly? This was interesting and all, and Lorca hardly wanted the doctors to condescend to him with infantile explanations, but... They already knew Lalana was strange. She was an alien. It was sort of the point, to seek out strange, new life.

Ek'Ez continued, oblivious to Lorca's disinterest in the unnamed implications. "If only her cells were more robust. My research was completely confounded while you were gone with her."

"If it's a question of keeping the cells alive," said Li, trailing off mysteriously.

"Would you like to join this conversation, Dr. Li?" Lorca said finally, and was rewarded by Li moving into view just behind Ek'Ez. (In so much as Li's dead-eyed face could be considered a reward of any kind.)

"The problem is," Ek'Ez began to explain, as if Lorca had asked him for an explanation (he had not), "the tremendous cellular decay rate. When lului cells are disconnected from the central matrix, they quickly begin to die. The samples survive for mere minutes, captain." He closed his eyes in disappointment.

"We can easily solve this by studying the cells without removing them," said Li, more to Ek'Ez than Lorca.

Ek'Ez was reluctant. "That is true, but..."

Lorca understood perfectly what Li was suggesting. They'd just rescued Lalana from captivity, and Li wanted to subject her to live experimentation. Sometimes Lorca wondered if Li had become a doctor because she was interested in curing infectious diseases or causing them. Technically-speaking, Li had a heart, but the word "heartless" suited her even more than it did Lalana. "Have you spoken to Lalana about this?"

Li nodded. "Yes, she was amenable."

Of course she was amenable, it was Lalana. "I really wish you hadn't," said Lorca. "You understand she's our guest? We're taking her back to her planet?"

"I wish to mount a medical research mission on that planet when we do!" said Ek'Ez.

Lorca suspected that was why Ek'Ez had contacted him, really: not to share the news of his discovery, but to ask Lorca to petition Starfleet on his behalf to lead a research mission before someone else of more importance learned about lului and tried to do the same.

One big problem with that. Two, actually. "Doctor. Has Lalana told you the history of Luluan?"

"History, captain?" Ek'Ez's inquiries had been entirely centered around medical and biological subjects, not history. Problem one: lului historically did not welcome aliens who used technology, and Ek'Ez had clearly missed the memo on the type of greeting such visitors tended to get.

That wasn't all. "You understand her people aren't warp-capable?" Understatement of the day, there.

"Well, yes, but as they have already been interfered with... by other parties..." Ek'Ez realized what he was saying and trailed off. "I see." Problem two: General Order 1. While it wasn't fully intact in this case, that didn't mean it didn't merit applying after the fact, especially if it was what the lului wanted for themselves.

"I'll do what I can, doctor, but no promises. Whether or not you get any sort of research expedition out of all this, I can't say. Best make use of the time you have now."

"The facilities on this ship, captain... they are..." The Triton wasn't a research ship. It wasn't even an exploration ship. Its medical and science facilities were, compared to most ships in the fleet at this point, rudimentary at best.

"It may be the only chance you get. Anything else?"

"Mm, no. Thank you for your time, captain."

Two down, one to go. Lorca double-checked San Francisco local time out of habit and requested a channel.

To his surprise, Cornwell appeared on the other end of the line. "Hello, Gabriel."

Her greeting indicated this wouldn't be an entirely formal conversation and he responded in kind. "Katrina. Wasn't expecting you."

"Are you ever?"

Lorca thought a moment. "No. You are a singularly surprising woman any man would be a fool to try and wrap his head around."

She looked immensely satisfied by the compliment. "Coming from the great Gabriel Lorca..." They'd had plenty of conversations in the past about Lorca's tendency for self-aggrandizement and Cornwell was well within her rights to make light of it. "Admiral Wainwright's at a conference on Rigel IV. He appointed me full admiral pro tem in his absence."

"Moving on up in the world, aren't we?"

She gave a short laugh. "I like to think so! At any rate, tell me how it went."

His childhood love of exploratory fiction served him well as he outlined the events of the Tederek mission. He knew exactly which parts to mention, which parts to gloss over, and how to phrase it all in a way that made Cornwell's eyes go wide with awe. He made sure to include Billingsley's fall from the ladder for the comedy and heroics, the gruesome joke that was the leskos for the drama and adventure ("galaxy's most murderous herbivore," he called it), and the encounter with the mind-eaters for a dash of horror and a second helping of heroism. He did not mention the near-miss with T'rond'n in the bathroom, or the giant gaping hole in Lalana's leg. Neither mishap had affected the mission's outcome, and he already knew they did not appear in Morita's writeup

She laughed and shook her head at the end of the tale, trying to picture Lorca impersonating an interstellar socialite. "So what's why you needed those files!"

"What did you think I was going to do with them?"

"Honestly?" she said, fixing him with a look. "I thought you might try to track him down and kidnap him, or detain him and have him do the outreach to the Dartarans."

"That was Plan C at best," he offered, and she laughed, despite the fact she suspected the joke wasn't far from the truth.

Something occurred to Lorca. "Say, you wouldn't happen to be the reason Admiral Over-My-Dead-Body signed off my little project, would you?"

Cornwell snorted, amused but disapproving. "Maybe we don't call him that in his office, even if he's not here."

It wasn't an answer. Lorca lifted an eyebrow.

Cornwell relented. "I only said he might give you a little leeway and see what you'd do with it. And that you wouldn't disappoint if he did."

"And have I disappointed?"

"Not yet," she smiled, "but you still don't have a direct line to the merchants."

"It's coming."

"So you say." Her tone was more lighthearted than worried. If Lorca said it was forthcoming, she believed him. But she did have another concern. Her expression darkened as she leaned forward and asked, "Be honest with me now, if Admiral Wainwright had said no to this whole mission, would you have accepted it?"

"He didn't say no."

"If he had."

"Focus on the road you're on, not the road you didn't travel," said Lorca. Cornwell recognized a fortune cookie when she heard one and frowned in response. Lorca knew he had to give her more than that. "If I'd thought I wasn't going to get the go-ahead, I wouldn't have checked in with command in the first place, I'd've exercised my discretion as captain. But I knew you'd have my back."

Cornwell mentally kicked herself for inadvertently enabling the whole charade. "So the whole point of you informing Starfleet in the first place was just to show off."

Lorca scoffed with feigned offense and smiled. "You got me." A moment later he was serious again. "I would have accepted Starfleet's orders, but I knew you wouldn't let Wainwright or anyone else stop me from doing the right thing." The right thing, in this context, meaning whatever he wanted to do. "A whole planet, Katrina, and they need our help."

"Your help, you mean."

Lorca shrugged as if it made no difference. "Right place, right time. That's all."

"Seems to happen a lot with you," she observed. "Careful now. Karma might balance the scales one day."

It was an entirely different aspect to karma than the one he'd talked about with Lalana, and while Lorca didn't fully ascribe to the idea as Cornwell was presenting it, there was a fortune cookie that read, _All jokes have a kernel of truth_. "That's why I'm on a starship. Karma will never catch up." She rolled her eyes at him. Lorca felt the tiniest pang. "You know, you're missed out here on the far reaches of civilization."

Cornwell smiled and shook her head. "Someone has to maintain the inner reaches, or else what's the point? Anyway, it was good to see you, Gabriel."

"Oh, I'm sure it was. Apparently, I have the most things of any human on my face."

Momentary confusion colored Cornwell's face. "What?"

"Nothing," said Lorca, smiling to himself. "Something our alien guest said."


	13. Callbacks

As the minutes turned to hours, even the great Gabriel Lorca began to feel the effects of doubt nibbling at the edges of his confidence, though he took great pains not to show it.

The Dartarans were running late. Almost two hours at this point, because he had thought they would initiate contact with the merchants during his call to Starfleet Command. That had been his intention: "Admiral, they're telling me the transmission is live now. Shall we?" Cue live communications intercept. Show Wainwright firsthand that he knew what he was doing, and his confidence and bravado were entirely justified.

But the call hadn't come, and as much as he'd enjoyed relaying a firsthand account of Tederek to Katrina (what a delightful surprise that was), it hadn't been the payoff he expected.

It was impossible to completely rule out that he might have misread the outcome of their conversation, but every bit of Lorca's instinct told him he had not, and he had to trust his instinct. It had rarely led him wrong. Coupled with the fact that doubt and hesitation were liable to get you or your crewmates killed in a pinch, he didn't afford himself the luxury of second-guessing things. You had to make your decision in the moment and ride out the results. Decisiveness was key to effective captaincy.

There had to be some information he was missing. How else to account for the miscalculation?

If only the investigation into the Dartarans' communications logs were getting anywhere. Russo had been cleared to return to duty and was presently engaged in a full and thorough reckoning of the logs from an office somewhere belowdecks, but hadn't had much success beyond identifying another hunting enthusiast who had probably been on a lului hunt and might have been the one to tell Margeh and T'rond'n about the opportunity in the first place.

The call would come. He simply had to distract himself until it did.

At the moment, that distraction took the form of Benford's ship report covering events onboard during the away mission. Lorca sat in the captain's chair, focused on the report with such pensive intensity he was almost completely still save for the faint tapping of a finger against his leg.

"Events" was a very generous description of the report's contents. It largely consisted of an accounting of routine, standard, and everyday shipboard tasks that might have characterized their time in any sector of space in the known universe, but which Benford had nevertheless diligently recorded to provide his captain with the peace of mind that, no matter what had happened on Tederek, the Triton had been secure and safe under the watchful eye of Jackson Benford. The only thing of any real note was a small, unofficial, personal addendum to the report detailing the installation of thermonuclear seat warmers that had been so "wildly successful" the upgrade had to be rescinded half an hour later lest the ship mutiny out of jealousy. (This was not the first time Benford had used a particularly boring shift as an opportunity for some creative writing, and would not be the last.)

Normally, Lorca would have gotten a chuckle out of Benford's addendum and the extremely apropos double-meaning behind Benford's usage of the words "hot ass," but his present frame of mind had no room for any levity. Instead, he reread for the fourth time a sentence detailing the minor adjustment of a deflector to compensate for interference from a local neutron star, parsing each word in a measured succession that eliminated all other active thought from his mind but failed to completely quiet the slow churn of discontent in his stomach.

And then it finally happened.

"Transmission intercept!" exclaimed Kerrigan, and the whole bridge seemed to snap to attention.

Unfortunately for the long-suffering Lt. Russo, the match for the transmission target came not from the logs he had been so painstakingly tracing, but from the Triton's main database.

"They're calling Risa?" said Kerrigan with a note of surprised confusion. "Planetary directory."

Risa, the pleasure planet, vacation jewel of the Federation. While that might have surprised Kerrigan, it made perfect sense to Lorca. Why wouldn't a purveyor of exotic hunting excursions catering to the galaxy's wealthy elite set up an office on a planet famed for its hedonism? He rocketed out of the captain's chair as the transmission came onscreen.

The two sides of the transmission were like night and day. The Risian woman on the left was stunningly beautiful, with bright green eyes and cascading waves of honey-brown hair framing the traditional Risian disc on her forehead. Arrangements of colorful tropical flowers filled the unoccupied areas of the frame with bursts of vibrant color. Everything about her seemed to convey beauty, light, and life.

In contrast, the Dartaran's dimly-lit office was immediately familiar to Lorca, as were their dour, prickly faces. The red curtains hanging on the walls were open, revealing several previously hidden bookshelves and dozens and dozens of hand-bound octagonal books. Several books were missing from the shelves and appeared to be stacked in the foreground on top of the office console. One of the books was currently being held aloft in Margeh's clawed hand.

The Risian woman beamed at the Dartarans as she said, "Warm welcomes from Risa, the most pleasant planet in the galaxy! How may I direct your call?"

"Beldehen Venel," Margeh read aloud from the book in her hand. It seemed like a name, but might also have been an establishment or a codeword.

Lorca pressed a hand to his face. _Damn it, Lalana._ The reason they couldn't locate the merchants' info in the Dartaran archives was because the damn Dartarans had _written it down_. And from the looks of it, it had taken Margeh and T'rond'n the better part of two hours to find the book containing the information they wanted. Lalana might have mentioned the presence of the logbooks behind the curtains to them when they were on the Tederek moon.

"One moment!" The Risian woman searched her directory. "Transferring you now. Have a lovely day!" Her exquisite face was replaced by a humanoid male with spotted pale yellow skin and fleshy whisker-like protrusions above his mouth. Lorca glanced at Arzo.

"Gentonian," supplied Arzo.

"Yes?" said the Gentonian. A flicker of recognition passed over his face. He remembered Margeh and T'rond'n from before. "Ah, you are..."

"We wish to hunt," said Margeh with a sense of immediacy that saved Venel the trouble of remembering who she was.

A smile emerged beneath the whiskers. "Excellent."

The conversation that followed was strictly business. The Dartarans requested "the same package as before" and discussed payment (which was exorbitant, and had apparently gone up since last time). Beldehen provided them with coordinates to meet at in a five days' time and ended the conversation with what sounded like a standard disclaimer: "As a reminder, we reserve right to reschedule your excursion at any time for any reason and we provide no guarantees as to the success of your endeavor. All fees are nonrefundable. Best of luck on your hunt."

Margeh terminated the transmission, but Lorca could easily imagine her unvoiced response: _Luck has nothing to do with it._

Lorca turned to face the bridge, smirking openly. "Ladies and gentlemen. Looks like we're going hunting." He could see the questions on their faces, but also the trust that their captain had everything well in hand as part of some master plan.

* * *

At 0900 hours, Lorca began to outline the final part of his master plan to all concerned parties in the conference room. With the exception of Lalana, the meeting consisted of Lorca's inner circle of senior staff: Commander Benford, Lieutenant Commander Morita, and Lieutenant Commander Arzo.

In such a private setting and with no impressionable junior officers to overhear, Benford had no qualms voicing his concerns with the plan. "Again into the field, captain?"

"Captain's prerogative," said Lorca, fixing Benford with a look that suggested the decision was a firm one.

"And I can think of no one I would rather have at my back in the event that things become difficult!" exclaimed Lalana. Arzo glared at her slightly in disapproval. It was the third time she had piped up to share a personal opinion. She didn't seem to quite grasp the particulars of meeting decorum and when might be appropriate for her to chime in. (Namely, when she had something of substantive informational value to contribute.)

Benford swallowed a sigh. There was no stopping a captain who wanted to take an active role in away missions, of course, and plenty of captains did just that, but they had four months until the new ship was ready. He really wanted to make sure Lorca was alive to see it, for both personal and professional reasons.

Lorca gestured at Lalana as if to say, "See? She gets it." Some part of him suspected the objection was jealousy on Benford's part. In the old days, Lorca and Benford had done more missions together than either cared to count, but lately Lorca had been spending more time with Morita. "Alright, then. Everyone clear on their part?"

"Yes, captain!" said Lalana.

"Sir," said Arzo with a nod. Morita inclined her head and Benford smiled warmly and nodded with decisive acceptance.

"Dismissed."

They all exited the conference room. Morita, Benford, and Arzo headed off to handle their respective preparations, but Lalana paused in the hallway just outside. Lorca had to sidestep to avoid tripping over her. He looked down at her expectantly. Her security detail was waiting for a destination, but she didn't seem to have one. "You know, I wanted to ask you something," he said, indicating she should join him.

"Oh?" She fell into step beside him. The security detail waited a moment, then followed a respectful distance behind.

"The name of the merchant Margeh and T'rond'n called? 'Beldehen Venel?' Was written down in one of their logbooks." The bridge came to alert as they entered, but Lorca barely took note.

"Was it?" said Lalana as they entered the ready room. She followed him to his desk and stretched up to its height.

Lorca took a pair of fortune cookies from the bowl and put one in front of her. "You might have mentioned those books when we were there." It wasn't terribly judgmental, just enough to convey his mild disappointment. He checked his fortune. _The world you can see is smaller than the world that is._

She did not take the cookie immediately. "I am sorry. I did not think the books were of note. I have never understood the appeal of them, to be honest with you. Books are such a flat way to experience the universe."

Lorca drew back in surprise. "Flat" was not a word he associated with the act of reading, technically correct as it might be. "I suppose your people don't have books."

"No. Lului do not write, we only speak. When you speak, the words are alive. When you write, they are dead."

Again, not how he would describe the written word. In fact, almost the exact opposite - writing had long been how humanity kept alive the words of the greatest minds in human history. It was also an efficient, engaging method of consuming information.

He ate his cookie, chewing contemplatively as Lalana finally opened hers. She put the cookie part in her mouth and held the fortune aloft with her tail for him to read. "Difficulty now is an investment in future happiness."

"Mm," she said. It was not clear if she agreed or disagreed with the sentiment. She seemed preoccupied.

He waited a moment. She had no teeth, but it seemed only right to give her a moment to do whatever it was that passed for chewing or digesting, even if Ek'Ez had said she did not have a real stomach. "Another for the road?"

"May I observe when you contact Beldehen Venel?"

The suddenness of the question surprised him. "I don't see why not. I'll have it patched through to your quarters."

"I meant, may I observe it directly?"

"From here?" It wasn't that he misunderstood her meaning, but it was an unusual request. "It's the same transmission anywhere on the ship."

Her tail flicked sharply to the side and she looked away. "It may seem that way to humans, but to me, it is very different to experience something in person than on a flat surface. The vibrations, the taste of the air, the sense of volume..."

"You mean firsthand, in the thick of the action." Lorca tilted his head very slightly. "We're not so different in that regard."

She turned her enormous green eyes back on him. "Then, I may observe it?"

He hesitated. "It might be a while..." He still had a few notes on Venel collected overnight to review.

"I will wait!" She immediately withdrew from the table and strode to the chair, gliding onto the seat.

Lorca frowned at her presumptuousness. "There isn't something you'd rather do? Jump around? Taste plants? Work with Kerrigan?" He realized he'd never asked what lului actually liked to do; his ideas of her hobbies largely stemmed from the tour of the ship, and the knowledge that she liked climbing trees, which wasn't an option on a starship. (He could have sent her to contribute to Li and Ek'Ez's research in sickbay, but he wanted plausible deniability in the event their poking and prodding soured his interspecies diplomacy.)

"Ensign Kerrigan is asleep for another two and a half hours," she said, proudly demonstrating her grasp of human time.

Fair enough. Kerrigan's current shift rotation started in the afternoon. "So make some new friends in the galley," Lorca offered. He almost suggested browsing the ship's cultural archives, except given her opinions on "flat" media, that was probably a miss.

The reaction this provoked was immediate. She touched her finger joints together. "Nnnn," she went, almost a whine, "a few people is fine, but too many is very... stressful, and in the galley there are always very many people."

As understandable as that was, she was being awfully stubborn. "There must be something you want to do besides sit in here."

"Nothing would make me happier in the universe!" she proclaimed, rotating her hands again. "I promise to be very quiet and not disturb you. I will take a nap." She twisted, curled up in the chair, and covered her eyes with her tail.

Lorca stared. He hadn't given permission and was well within his rights to remove her. "Lalana," he said sternly, "if you're going to take a nap, do that in your quarters." No response. " _Lalana_."

"Please may I stay in here? I hate being in there alone."

She was still curled up with her eyes covered, so there weren't any physical emotional indicators, but it didn't take a genius to see she was lonely. She knew a handful of people on the ship, all of whom were there to do their jobs, and the one person whose job it was to interact with her was asleep.

Perhaps he'd see about assigning another ensign to keep her company. Maybe someone had an idea for a cultural or historical survey they'd like to do before Lalana was returned to her homeplanet. He made a mental note to have Benford elicit some proposals from the crew. In the meantime... "Fine," he said. "Just this once."

Lorca grabbed a cup of coffee and resumed his review of the intelligence gathered overnight, glancing at Lalana periodically. She didn't move and he soon stopped looking. The Risians had been happy to comply and supply all their records pertaining to the merchants, and of course Command had a couple of pertinent files, and Lorca now had a fairly good idea of Beldehen Venel's role on Risa and his purpose at large.

Venel represented the legitimate business operations of a small Gentonian merchant conglomerate with an office on Risa. They were one of hundreds of suppliers to local establishments and seemed entirely unremarkable on the surface. But their connection to various higher-end cultural and entertainment establishments gave them access to information about Risa's more elite patrons. This would be how they farmed targets for the more lucrative tourism side of their business.

Lorca also took a moment to review the file of "Gabriel Lopez," which the overnight security chief had fabricated for the operation. It was nothing fancy, just a standard Federation citizen record that would come up when Venel checked. There was one for Morita, too.

Unlike the ruse with Margeh and T'rond'n, this call didn't require any particular conversational preparation, just a clear head. He cleared his throat. "Lalana?" Her tail shifted and she turned her head towards him. He wondered if she had actually been sleeping, or just sitting with her eyes closed for the past twenty minutes. He activated a commlink to the communications station. "Connect me to Risa's central directory."

"Yes, sir," said Russo.

Lorca removed his uniform tunic. "Not a single word," he warned Lalana. She placed her tail over her mouth.

The transmission went live and Lorca was pleasantly surprised to see the same Risian woman as before. "Warm welcomes from Risa, the most pleasant planet in the galaxy! How may I direct your call?"

Even knowing this was her standard greeting, it still felt warmly personal when she said it directly to him. "Beldehen Venel," he replied, smiling in return. Whoever had decided to employ a woman with her looks as a planetary greeter had made an excellent choice. It was enough to make you want to abandon whatever you were doing to fly to Risa and ask her what time she finished work, and if she was free later.

"One moment!" Sadly, her face disappeared, and Lorca hastily adjusted his expression to a more neutral one as Beldehen Venel appeared in her place.

"Starway Traders," greeted Venel, the name of the conglomerate.

"Beldehen Venel?" asked Lorca, as if he weren't sure.

"Yes, I am Beldehen."

Lorca smiled confidently. "Gabriel Lopez. I got your name from a friend of mine, Margeh. You spoke yesterday?" He kept his tone entirely casual, relying on his naturally disarming charm.

Beldehen was understandably on edge having yesterday's conversation mentioned by a complete stranger. "Yes? What of it?

"We were wondering if you could add two more to the expedition."

Beldehen did not respond immediately, but there seemed to be an unrepentantly greedy glint in his eye.

Lorca went on, "You see, we have a bet with them. They said they'd catch three of these 'lului,' so naturally, my wife said she'd catch four. I mean, assuming you have the space."

Whatever reservations Beldehen had were quickly erased. He recognized the overconfidence of a rich mark when he saw it, and betting was a common pastime of the fabulously wealthy. "That can be arranged. Did you want the same package?"

"Well now, that depends," said Lorca, looking almost comically pensive. "What options are available?"

Beldehen began to rattle off several amenities, noting that there were no permanent accommodations on the planet, so everything would have to be brought in with them and removed, thus the cost. Lorca picked mostly lower-range options, but scattered in a few mid-range choices so he didn't sound too stingy.

Then came the trophy options.

"Standard trophies are skulls and lenses. The lenses are the most popular part, a biological glass, absolutely unique to the species, and we can mount them for display free of charge. Unfortunately, all the other parts degrade, but there is a process that can net you a full skeletal replica of your kill if you prefer! For a modest fee."

Lorca resisted the urge to look in Lalana's direction. "I don't think that'll be necessary, skull and lenses sound fine."

"We also offer a meal package. Eat what you kill, prepared by a top-grade specialist chef. Lului meat has a shelf life of under an hour and doesn't freeze well, so we guarantee a meal like you won't find anywhere else!"

Lorca swallowed, careful not to let his posture or expression slip in the slightest. "Just interested in the hunt, but thank you." Lalana might have preferred he pick that option, but he couldn't agree to eat a member of her species, not with her right there in the room.

The total turned out to be a little more than Margeh and T'rond'n's package, but entirely manageable. "There is also the matter of security arrangements."

These turned out to be extremely comprehensive, to the point that Lorca interrupted after a few minutes and asked, "Can you just forward these to us and I'll have my assistant take a look?"

"We will give you a copy of our procedures, but it's important I outline them now, to ensure you understand the importance." Lorca begrudgingly gave his assent and Beldehen continued with the overview.

The merchants seemed to have covered every conceivable possibility in terms of security. All gear and luggage would be searched, no communications devices of any kind were allowed, no recording devices, no unauthorized or unknown vessels were allowed at the meeting area or while in transit, their transport would be left behind at the rendezvous point, the list went on. "A single violation of these protocols, and we will be forced to cancel your trip and reschedule," stressed Beldehen. "Do you understand and agree to these protocols on behalf of yourself and the other members of your party?"

"I do."

"Very well. Be sure to have payment ready in full. I'll send you the coordinates after we've received payment." They were new customers, so Beldehen was taking some extra precautions. Probably wanted to look up Mr. and Mrs. Lopez's information before fully committing to the expedition.

"Oh, that won't be necessary, we'll ride with Margeh and T'rond'n," said Lorca. "And they'll cover our payment. They lost the last bet we had." He grinned.

"Very well. Please remember, we may reschedule your trip at any time for any reason, and we make no guarantee as to the success of your endeavor." It was almost word-for-word his last words to the Dartarans. How many times had he given this spiel to clients over the years? "Best of luck on your hunt."

Since Lorca wasn't upset the way Margeh had been, he offered her thoughts as a final send-off: "Luck has nothing to do with it."


	14. All That Glitters

The smile faded from Lorca's face almost as quickly as the transmission terminated. He stared at the wall display, arms stiff and palms pressed against the desk, breathing slowly through his nose with a mixture of anger and disgust.

He saw Lalana move in the corner of his eye and glanced towards her. She approached the desk and drew herself up to its height. He took a deep breath to clear his anger. "Get what you needed?"

Her huge, unblinking eyes betrayed nothing, but she reached into the bowl of fortune cookies on the table with her tail and plucked out one, putting it in front of him like a reward. "I am very sorry to have put you in this position, captain," she said. "But I cannot express adequately the immense thankfulness I feel for what you are doing for my people. The Lului will never forget this. I will make sure of it."

He smiled faintly and took the cookie. "That's reward enough for me." It was a shame lului didn't go in for tools or structures of any kind. He would have liked a statue or three, or a city named after him. Maybe in ten thousand years their culture would evolve to such a point. Unfortunately, absent written records, it seemed unlikely he would still be remembered. He cracked the cookie open.

"You have done so much more than I ever could have expected. Before I met you, the only aliens I had ever encountered were trying to hunt or kill me, or seemed not to think anything of the fact. That there is an entire Starfleet of people who would risk themselves to protect others is an unimaginable treasure."

An unimaginable treasure. There was no way of knowing at this point how much of her phrasings were the translator or nuance inherent to the lului language, but she really seemed to have a way with words. "It's a shame you don't write. I think you'd be good at it." She clicked her tongue, finding that funny. "No books, no art, no manufacturing, no buildings... What do your people do all day long?"

"We watch things! That is why our eyes are so big."

He wasn't entirely sure if it was a joke until he heard her lightly click twice. He chuckled faintly, shook his head, and sighed. She was worse than him in some ways.

She looked at the slip of paper on the table. "What did the fortune say?"

"If you fail to try, you never succeed."

"Ah! May I keep that one?"

He handed it to her with a shrug. It was the first time she'd shown any real interest in the physical paper. She pressed it against her chest with her tail, piercing it at the top and bottom with tendrils of fur that looped around through the miniscule holes and secured it in place. Of course, being unable to read, she had affixed it upside-down. He bit his tongue and decided not to mention it.

She tilted her head down to admire the paper adornment. When she turned back to him, it was easy to imagine she was smiling. "What will you do next?"

Lorca cocked his head and furrowed his brow. "You know how he said the price was higher for us than Margeh and T'rond'n?"

"Nn," she offered in assent, and nodded awkwardly. Apparently she was beginning to integrate human physical cues into her repertoire.

"I was thinking we'd go make up that shortfall." From the grin on his face, it was clear he had one of those plans that was going to be very dangerous fun to execute.

* * *

"Thirty seconds!"

Lorca was, at least for a moment, sitting in his chair, but the rush of adrenaline at what was coming propelled him out of it towards the viewscreen. "Red alert!" he called in a serious tone, but with an undeniable note of something approaching glee, because the coming encounter truly was in his wheelhouse. The ship lights dimmed to emergency as unnecessary systems terminated and valuable power and resources were redirected towards combat essentials.

"Five seconds!" Carver, too, sounded in good spirits, finding her captain's mood infectious.

The Triton slid into normal space with shields up and weapons powered, coming face to face with a waiting fleet of four starships of mixed origin: a Rigellian freighter refitted with extra weapons, a mid-size Tellarite attack cruiser, and a pair of Andorian strike craft, small and very quick. Behind this ragtag fleet sat a large asteroid outfitted with a docking port and several cannons and beam weapons, some of them stripped off of starships. Locating this base had been the central purpose of the Triton's recently abandoned patrol assignment in this sector of space.

"All power to dorsal shields, take us under," ordered Lorca. Under, of course, was a relative term in space, but Carver sent the ship along a course that presented the reinforced side of the ship to the enemy.

"Incoming hail!" reported Russo, loudly but calmly.

"Onscreen."

The yellow and blue face that appeared was entirely a familiar one, because Lorca had encountered it half a dozen times since taking command of the Triton. "Greshy!" he greeted in a tone verging on manic.

Greshengavalitenorat was entirely displeased to see him and frothed slightly as he spat back his name in full, because in his species, each syllable constituted a point of honor, and to refer to someone by anything less than their full name was implying an immense degree of disrespect and (in Lorca's case particularly) unforgivable familiarity. In fact, Gresh had added two more syllables since their last encounter: "Greshengavalitenora _timal!_ "

Lorca knew fully well that name syllables were usually added by Stibellian tribal leaders, and Gresh had not been appointed to this position much less seen a tribal elder in at least five years, so the syllables added to his name were all the pirate's own doing and hardly worthy of repeat.

The Triton shuddered as phaser blasts from Gresh's little fleet hit the shields to modest effect. Ops reported shields down eight percent, but that wasn't important. "Timal, that's new. Let me guess, it means 'runs from Starfleet,'" Lorca quipped, barely reacting to the volley. It was a good thing Benford wasn't present; he might have questioned whether or not baiting Gresh was truly a necessity.

It wasn't. But it was fun.

"You will be destroyed, human! You are no match for us." Another volley dropped the Triton's shields to seventy-five percent. "I want to watch the look on your face as you burn!"

The Triton shifted a portion of shield power rearward to protect the warp nacelles as it put the bulk of Gresh's fleet behind it. Carver was taking them on a roundabout course towards the underside of the asteroid base. The base's defenses fired, further weakening the shields to sixty-two percent, but this had the added benefit of making it more difficult for the ship fleet to follow along that same course, as they ran the very real risk of running into friendly fire.

"You know, I would love to grant that wish for you, Greshy, but... Eraldo?"

Russo terminated the transmission. The Triton began to swing around the rear of the asteroid, out of reach of the station's forward=facing armaments.

Lorca held up his hand as if conducting an orchestra. "And... Now!" He dropped his hand, and on cue, the Triton's shields dropped.

Though the Triton's course under the asteroid had not been advisable for the allied pirate ships, one of the captains of the Andorian strike craft had the foresight to fly over the top of the base and began pelting the Triton's unshielded hull with phaser fire, scorching ugly marks across the ship's bow.

"Minor breaches, decks three to five," reported ops.

"Steady on," said Lorca. "Chief, tell me you're done!"

"Done!" came Billingsley's voice over the comms.

The command didn't need to be said, but Lorca gave it: "Shields up!" The strike craft's next shots was absorbed to little effect. "Full impulse!"

The Triton sailed over the strike craft and was presented with the rest of the pirate fleet again.

"Fire on that freighter!" The lieutenant at the tactical station didn't need to be told twice. The Rigellian freighter was four things: the largest of Gresh's craft, the most heavily armored, the slowest, and the least shielded. The freighter's main purpose was the transport of seized goods, not ship to ship combat, and though it had been outfitted with more weapons than were standard, like all retrofit armaments, its phaser systems were more liable to overload or misfire because the ship's power systems had not been designed for them. Especially when its shields were under stress.

Gresh's hodgepodge installation on the asteroid shared many of these same characteristics, with the substantial difference that its armaments, temperamental as they could be, were very powerful. Soaring back to the front of the asteroid put the Triton back in range of these weapons, and suddenly it was taking fire from both sides and Lorca had to grab the safety handle on Carver's station to avoid falling over. "Drop us," he said to Carver.

For a moment, it looked like the Triton was on a collision course with at least two members of Gresh's fleet, but the saucer continued its tilt downward, drawing the base's fire toward the pirate ships. Coupled with the Triton's fire, the freighter's shields sputtered and a small explosion sparked from an overloaded power relay. Its systems were disabled. Though its weapons were the weakest of the bunch, it was one less thing for Carver to worry about as she carried out Lorca's order of evasive maneuvers.

They had one goal and one goal only at this point: to distract Gresh's fleet and buy time.

* * *

In the Triton's faintly bulky EV Suits, the four figures making their way across the asteroid's surface could have been anyone. It was only on closer inspection that their identities were revealed: Commander Jackson Benford, Lieutenant Commander Reiko Morita, Lieutenant Commander Arzo, and a security officer named Walter Chen who held the rank of Lieutenant junior grade.

The battery of fire from the asteroid's defenses lit up the "sky" overhead with an array of red, yellow, and blue lights as beautiful as it was deadly. Benford led them towards the nearest access point and Arzo overrode the airlock controls.

Benford watched the Triton pass over their position, wincing at the assortment of fire the ship was taking. The shields were dangerously low already. Pushing his worry for the ship out of his mind, Benford followed the others into the airlock.

He waited for the telltale hiss of atmosphere to subside before removing his helmet. Arzo was already overriding the internal door controls. Benford, Morita, and Chen advanced with weapons ready.

They followed Arzo's directions, heading towards a dilithium signature through the twisting maze of rough-hewn rock tunnels. Luckily the Triton was doing an excellent job of keeping Gresh distracted, and most of the pirates were on their ships.

But not all. Two life signs were ahead, and from Arzo's readings, there was no way to reach the stash except through that tunnel. They would have to shoot their way through. They split to either side of the hallway and advanced.

The guards were a Stibellian female and an Orion male. The Stibellian heard their footsteps coming and called out, "Who goes there!" Her companion grunted dismissively.

"Probably just rocks," he said after a moment. There were occasional shudders as armaments from the Triton hit the asteroid base, shaking dust from the ceiling and walls.

"You're so stupid, Or-Harran," said the Stibellian. "You deserve to be here, but me-!"

They waited a moment, but the bickering seemed to have ended. The hall was quiet. Benford signaled Morita and Chen.

They whipped around the corner, firing to stun. The Orion male was unprepared, but the Stibellian female on his far side was facing them with her weapon at the ready. Still, both fell to the ground.

They proceeded towards the door, Morita with a frown. "Who hit her?" she asked, looking at the Stibellian. She'd targeted the larger Orion male and hadn't seen a shot hit the second target, and she didn't see any phaser burns.

The answer was no one. The Stibellian suddenly bounced to her feet, grabbing Chen as a shield, the point of a Klingon dagger pressing into his back. "Starfleet scum!" she hissed, backing towards to control panel by the door.

"Not one more step," warned Morita.

"You wouldn't shoot your own crew, Starfleet," said the Stibellian.

Morita jerked her chin confidently. "Try me." She lined up her shot. The Stibellian tried to pull Chen backwards, but he stood his ground, eyes fixed calmly on Morita. They were here to do a job and Chen had no intention of being the reason they failed it.

The Stibellian realized she didn't have the leverage to force Chen to shield her all the way to the panel. The frill behind her ears raised with anger. She wasn't going to be able to alert Gresh to the intruders.

But there was something she could do. "Remember me!" she shouted, and jammed the dagger through the EV suit into the soft flesh beneath Chen's ribcage. "I am Eqomaleniba, now Eqomalenibaley!" Apparently, the trend of assigning your own syllables was endemic to Gresh's crew.

Chen slumped against the wall. Morita fired and Stibellian fell to the ground for real this time. Both Morita and Arzo were at Chen's side a moment later. "I'm- I'm okay," he panted, wincing and groaning. The blood from the wound was dark and viscous. Morita applied a self-sealing compress to stop the flow.

"What about them?" asked Arzo, glancing at the pirates. "They may compromise our mission if they reveal we were down here."

"Not our concern," said Benford. "Can he move?"

"He shouldn't," advised Morita.

Benford and Arzo each took one of Chen's arms and helped him into the cargo storage area, sitting him against the wall behind one of the larger crates. He nodded his thanks.

The storage was full of crates of design and markings belonging to several spacefarings entities, Starfleet included. Several crates of unrefined dilithium sat among the various prizes and baubles seized from passing freighters. The quantity of dilithium was far more than they needed for their purposes. Arzo confirmed its quality and Benford attached transponders to two of the dilithium crates. Most of the goods would be returned to their rightful owners. If a couple of crates went missing, who was to say they hadn't been ferreted away somewhere else by one of the pirates, or used, or traded?

Benford checked his mission clock. They were running a couple minutes behind due to Chen's injury. He pressed a phaser into Chen's hand. "On to Objective B," he announced, and hoped the continuing barrage of fire they heard was a good sign.

* * *

"Shields down!"

"All power to weapons!" ordered Lorca as the lights of the bridge flickered and flashed. Where the hell was Benford?

The Triton was running a good game against the three remaining pirate ships and the base, but there was only so much it could do. The Andorian strike craft were impossible targets, so they had focused all their firepower on the Tellarite cruiser and the asteroid's firepower. The cruiser was moderately damaged, and at this point, so was the Triton. Two of the asteroid's main batteries were down, including one of the flak cannons, but three-quarters of its armaments were still firing just fine.

If this remained a war of attrition, the Triton would lose.

"Warp signature!" called out the officer at Arzo's station, and a moment later, the Shenzhou slid into view, releasing a full volley of weapons fire toward the base and flying between the Triton and the brunt of the oncoming fire.

"They're hailing," said Russo, brushing the hair from his face as if anyone on the Shenzhou was going to care what the bridge crew of the Triton looked like.

A familiar face appeared onscreen. "Captain Georgiou, I see you got my invitation," greeted Lorca.

Philippa Georgiou couldn't resist a smile, partly because she was pleased to see the confident young man she had first encountered as lieutenant commander finally in command of his own starship, and partly because it was impossible not to feel a sense of pride at arriving on scene a last-minute hero. "Making trouble again I see, captain."

The bridge of the Shenzhou looked positively serene compared to the Triton. Absolutely no consoles were sparking, smoking, or blinking. No one looked the least bit unkempt. Lorca ignored the complete disparity between their bridges and smoothly replied, "Trouble? No, we've got this situation completely under control."

"Really?" questioned Georgiou. The Triton was matching course to the Shenzhou, keeping the other ship's shields between it and any further damage. One of the Andorian strike craft suddenly spun away at a vector away from the battle, disabled by the Shenzhou's superior phasers.

"Shields back online," reported ops.

"Oh, absolutely," said Lorca, and as if on cue, a line of explosions triggered on Gresh's asteroid and three more batteries went down. "Would you look at that."

Georgiou was surprised by that, and curious. "You?" she queried.

Lorca shrugged in reply. "Maybe." His smug smile said it all.

The Tellarite cruiser suddenly decided the battle didn't look so promising and broke away, cutting all power to its weapons and going to warp. Absent its larger companion, the remaining Andorian strike craft followed suit.

"Would you look at that. No honor among pirates," said Lorca.

"Gresh is hailing," said Russo.

Lorca was gratified Gresh was still hailing the Triton instead of the newly-arrived Shenzhou. "Put it on."

The transmission was full of static, but Lorca could just about make out Gresh's infuriated expression. "Stop! Enough! I surrender!" His forces had abandoned him and his plunder wasn't worth dying over.

"We accept," said Lorca simply, and could have left it at that. Instead, he asked, "Tell me, Greshy. How many syllables do you think your Tribal Council will give me for bringing you in?"

Greshengavalitenoratimal howled and Georgiou shook her head. Yes, that was entirely the Gabriel Lorca she remembered.


	15. Threat Assessment

Given that the Triton had borne the brunt of the battle and was presently undergoing an extensive series of noncritical repairs, Georgiou invited Lorca to meet with her on the Shenzhou and provided a pair of engineering teams from the larger ship to assist with the efforts. The Triton had weathered the battle well all things considered, but there were still a lot of small holes to patch, power relays to replace, and pictures to straighten on the walls. It would take a couple hours before they were back underway.

Five minutes after the invite, Lorca materialized in the Shenzhou's transporter room and greeted Georgiou once more: "Captain."

"Captain," she replied in kind, smiling warmly. "Command looks good on you."

He stepped down from the transporter pad. "Thank you."

Georgiou gestured towards the door and they proceeded into the hall. "I take it you are enjoying your promotion?"

"It's a lot of responsibility, but I think we're doing some real good out there." The response was entirely a diplomatic one. Georgiou approved; it was good to know Lorca still had that capability when he chose. Some in Starfleet thought he was a little rowdy and gung ho for a captain, and he typically seemed to conform to these expectations, but Georgiou had always had the impression he was something of a dark horse and capable of surprising people. Certainly he did a good job of convincing others or his merits and ideas when speaking with them directly.

"I'm glad to hear it." They stepped into the turbolift, but their destination was not the bridge. "Do you drink tea?"

"I prefer coffee, but I won't say no if you're offering," replied Lorca.

The Shenzhou's turbolift was noticeably faster than the Triton's. In fact, everything about Georgiou's ship seemed faster, brighter, and shinier than the Triton. The difference between a ship in the middle of its service life and a ship at the end was staggering. And his next ship? How would it compare? "Hope you didn't mind too much taking over our patrol route," offered Lorca.

Georgiou shook her head. "Captains can go many years in command without ever being truly tested. You seem to have found a way to force a test."

"Ah. So you heard, then? About our guest?"

"Bits and pieces when we took over your mission." They exited the turbolift and changed subjects to more routine discussion as they passed various crewmembers in the halls.

Their destination turned out to be the captain's mess. Lorca very rarely used his; he had a habit of eating at his desk in the ready room. Anything to be closer to the action. Georgiou clearly did use hers and had decorated it to her tastes, with an old star chart depicting the constellations of ancient Greece, a stylized rendition of entwined herons on the adjacent wall, a pair of well-tended dracaenas adorning the far corners of the room, and a beautiful enameled globe of home. The tea was already set.

They sat at the corner of the table, where they could share the tea and talk with ease. Georgiou served, asking as she poured out the cups, "You discovered a new intelligent species?"

"Something like that," said Lorca. "Thank you." The teacup was very hot to the touch and Georgiou blew across the surface of hers to cool it.

"They didn't tell me much more than that. Will I be able to meet this alien?"

In truth, the Shenzhou was more suited to the parameters of Lorca's self-appointed mission, but the Shenzhou hadn't picked up Lalana's distress call. "Unfortunately, her physiology is incompatible with the transporters, else I would have brought her along." He wasn't entirely lying. The Triton wasn't exactly fit for guests at the moment. (Of course, he wasn't about to risk Lalana discovering that most Starfleet starships were a good deal shinier and flashier than the one she was on. He could just picture her excitement as she cheerfully abandoned the Triton for its larger, much improved cousin.) "And we're on a tight schedule. Once the repairs are done, we'll be underway."

Georgiou sensed Lorca wasn't being entirely honest with her. He might have invited her to visit the Triton despite its damage. Georgiou was no stranger to the aftermath of space battles and would not have judged the Triton or its captain any for it. "So secretive," she teased lightly, eyes bright as she sipped at her tea.

"Maybe," he admitted, but it was all the admission he was willing to give. He lifted the teacup to his nose and inhaled. It had the subtle delicacy of a perfectly-brewed cup.

Georgiou wondered if Lorca's reason for secrecy might stem from a personal interest in the alien. "Is there anything you will tell me? What is she like? Is she beautiful?"

He laughed. "Well, she's about this tall" - he held his hand just above the height of the table - "and sort of a cross between a gerbil and a sea anemone. So, no, I wouldn't say she's beautiful." He chuckled and shook his head. "Smart, though, and funny." Also slightly clingy, if he was being totally honest. (Or a lot clingy - the leskos hadn't been able to shake her.) "Mostly she's out of her element. It's imperative we get her back home."

The description surprised Georgiou. Now she really was curious, and not just because Starfleet had asked her to investigate the Triton's situation. "You simply must allow my science officer a chance to meet her," she said, friendly but insistent.

Lorca wondered how to decline without raising the suspicions of a captain as savvy as Georgiou and took a long sip of his tea.

He never got to answer this question. The comm beeped. "Emergency transmission from the Triton."

The Shenzhou had holocomms, but they were wasted in this instance because the Triton wasn't similarly outfitted. Benford appeared as a flat headshot with a background floating in midair. "Captain, you're needed back on the ship immediately," said Benford. He looked ashen and spoke tersely.

Lorca put his tea down unfinished. "Be right there." Georgiou stood with him, but Lorca held up a hand. "I know the way," he said, and strode out before Georgiou could say anything further. He broke into a run in the hall. A few of the Shenzhou's crew looked surprised seeing the Triton's captain dash by, but he didn't care.

There was someone else on the transporter pad already, a tall, thin alien wearing a science uniform. Lorca eyed him suspiciously as he hopped onto the transporter pad.

"The captain said I am to accompany you," said the alien in explanation, and Lorca inwardly cursed. So Georgiou had been planning as much from the start. "I am Lieutenant Saru."

Lorca ignored it for now. One benefit of the non-holocomm system was that Lorca recognize the backdrop behind Benford as sickbay. "Triton sickbay. Energize," he said.

They were enveloped in light as the Shenzhou's transporter room was replaced by sickbay. It was an easy destination to target even from the Shenzhou because it was the default destination for any emergency-coded transports.

Sickbay was abuzz with activity. Both Li and Ek'Ez were in action, operating on opposite sides of the room, and almost the full complement of nurses stretched between them. One benefit of being the initiators of the attack was having all the medical personnel at the ready. Most of the wounds in the room were minor: small plasma and electrical burns, bumps and scrapes. Lorca had preemptively sent Lalana to sickbay before the battle's start and she was making herself useful, assisting one of the nurses with basic tasks like applying bandages.

One case was clearly not so minor. Ek'Ez, Benford, Morita, and a nurse were all gathered around an intensive-care slab.

Lt. Saru was somewhat shocked to be thrown into the thick of things, but Lorca had no time for him. He strode over to the slab and found Walter Chen, pale, sweaty, and nearly breathless. "What happened?"

"He was stabbed," said Ek'Ez, "and the weapon was coated in a potent neurotoxin." Lorca looked at Ek'Ez for further clarification. Ek'Ez shook his head in confirmation of the dire prognosis.

"Chen," said Lorca, moving next to Benford.

"Captain," managed Chen.

This was not the first time Lorca had lost someone under his command, but it was the first time since becoming captain, which made it different. He put a hand on Chen's shoulder. "We got them, Walter. Because of you. Good job, lieutenant."

Chen managed the tiniest nod imaginable, more a miniscule spasm than a proper acknowledgment, and closed his eyes. His breathing didn't shudder so much as gently empty like a leaf falling to the ground, deflating him. He was gone.

Lorca kept his hand on Chen's shoulder. Chen wasn't a young man, being a year older than Morita, and had known and understood the risks with his years of experience, but this didn't make it any easier. He had lost his life as a result of his service onboard the Triton. Across from Lorca, Morita brushed her hand against Chen's hair. It had been her choice to bring him on the mission. She bore as much responsibility as Lorca did in his death. They drew the sheet over his head together. Ek'Ez moved on to his living patients.

"He was a good officer," she said, still looking down in the direction of Chen's face.

"He was," confirmed Lorca, carefully watching Morita's face for some sign as to how she was handling it. She seemed sad, which was good, because it meant she wasn't bottling the emotion up, and clearly she regretted Chen's passing, but there was also a peaceful calm about her. She was no stranger to death, either.

"Come on," said Benford to Morita, tilting his head towards the sickbay doors. As first officer, he was responsible for the welfare of the crew and wanted to ensure Morita's well-being in his own way. They left the room together. (Benford had been there, too, but Lorca already had full confidence in his XO's ability to cope with loss.)

Lorca remained at the bedside, feeling grim. This battle with the pirates had been a goal well before they met Lalana, and had always borne the risk of fatalities, but still. Her presence had moved the battle up and changed a few parameters. In another universe, things might have turned out very differently.

He knew better than to dwell. He looked around sickbay. A body covered by a sheet made for a stark reminder of the risks of being in Starfleet. Some looked at it, others avoided it. There was no one correct response to death.

Lorca saw the Shenzhou science officer in conversation with Lalana. The officer had his tricorder out. She was shifting colors for him. This display of irreverence irked Lorca. Even if there was no one correct way, there were definitely incorrect ones. He moved towards the two security officers posted by the door.

"Bring our guest back to her quarters," he instructed them, exiting.

The two officers moved towards Lalana and informed her they were taking her back to her quarters. She gave no protest, but the Shenzhou scientist attempted to accompany her and was denied. It was outside of their orders, said one of the security officers, and he could take any objections up with the captain. Lalana bade him goodbye and left with her escort.

Saru stood in the Triton's sickbay, looking like a complete fish out water. The captain was gone, but even if he had been there, Saru did not think the Triton's commander would have entertained his protest.

* * *

"What did you think?"

Saru had returned to the Shenzhou almost immediately to report the details of his interactions with the Triton's alien. He stood in the situation room with Georgiou, shifting his weight back and forth between his lanky legs. "She did not trigger any threat response," he said in conclusion, "and she seemed nice."

"But?" prompted Georgiou.

He could not say the same about Captain Lorca. "The captain did not let me speak with her for very long. In fact, he had her escorted out."

"Mm," hummed Georgiou. "Thank you, Saru."

"I am sorry I could not be of more help, captain."

Perhaps she should have sent someone with Saru. She valued the Kelpien's opinion, especially where his threat ganglia were concerned, but he had a marked aversion to confrontation, and a little more backbone might have yielded more information.

"You did fine. Dismissed, lieutenant," said Georgiou with a kindness that indicated she did not blame him for his failure. Sometimes it felt like she had to handle Saru with kid gloves. He was so sensitive about his own shortcomings. He would be a good officer in time, though, once he developed some more confidence.

Georgiou considered Saru's impressions. She could confidently report that the lului was no threat, but little else. She wasn't entirely sure what to make of Lorca's performance or decisions. Unfortunately, Starfleet had asked her to assess both.

But then, she had never been interested in Starfleet Command's inner politics. She was a starship captain not because she lacked the clout for promotion, but because she preferred it to the alternative. That meant she had a healthy respect for other captains and the variability of the position. She would not begrudge a newly-minted captain figuring out his own way of handling things, or suggest that because he had lost a crewman today that he had made any mistakes. From what she could tell, Lorca was an effective and creative captain with a streak of tactical brilliance. That was the sort of person Starfleet needed in the chair.

The assessment she sent did not sing his praises, but did not undercut them, either, and confirmed the alien in question did not pose a danger. By the time she was finished with with it, the engineering crews were back from the Triton and the two ships went their separate ways.

* * *

Lorca tossed his uniform tunic over the back of a chair and poured a drink. It had been a mixed day. On the one hand, a clear victory over a notorious group of space pirates and another step of his master plan completed. On the other, a body now resting in cold storage in the ship's morgue.

He'd made the call to Chen's family a priority. Point of contact had been Chen's brother, Paul, who seemed to take the information in stride, but had probably broken down in tears after the call ended. Lorca made sure his family knew he had fallen in the line of duty, but it was hard not to see that as just words, empty and meaningless to people who had just lost a loved one. More important had been his description of Chen as having served on the Triton with steadfast dependence, Chen's high level of involvement in day-to-day operations, and his passion for the mess hall's cereal diversity, because those were the personal details of Chen's life aboard the Triton that reminded his family he had died doing what he loved in the company of people who valued him both as a person and for his contributions to the ship, which had been numerous.

Some part of Lorca had to examine the situation practically. Chen's death did have a small tactical advantage. If the pirate who had stabbed Chen implied anything suspicious about the away team's presence, it would be easy to discredit her as trying to shift focus away from her murder of a Starfleet officer. Not that anyone was going to ask or take her word about the issue in the first place. Probably this was completely moot in the grand scheme of things.

Lorca sipped at his drink. It suited him far better than Georgiou's tea.

The comm in his quarters beeped. "Lalana to Captain Lorca," came the identification. It was the first time she had ever called him on the ship's comms.

"Go."

"Captain, are you busy?."

He looked at the drink in his hand and put it down. "I wouldn't have answered if I were. What's up?"

"I was wondering about the ship that was outside? The one Saru was from?"

"The Shenzhou."

"Yes. It is also a Starfleet vessel?"

"That's right."

"Are there many Starfleet vessels?"

Lorca rubbed his temple. "Lalana, it's late. Can this wait until morning?"

"Yes, I suppose, but I was wondering, is it coming back?"

There it was, the other shoe. Big, shiny ship. "No. They have their own assignment."

"What a relief!"

His head jerked up and his brow furrowed. What?

"I was so worried they were going to try and remove me from the Triton. Saru was asking so many questions, and had such an interest... I am very glad they have left, and they will not be back."

The corner of Lorca's mouth twitched. It wasn't a smile - this day had been too long and too tragic - and it was gone almost as soon as it appeared, but for a moment, there had been the faintest promise of something not unlike a happy thought. "The Shenzhou's a much better ship than the Triton." There was no harm in admitting it now that it was gone.

"Oh, I do not think that is the case."

"It's bigger, newer, more powerful..."

"But it cannot be better, because you are not its captain."

Lorca closed his eyes a moment. It was a compliment of the highest order in most circumstances, but maybe not on a day when said captaincy had resulted in the death of a crewmember. "Right, well, it's late, so..."

The next words out of his mouth were going to be "Lorca out," but Lalana went, "Captain!" with a note of concern in her voice that gave him pause. "Your voice is... less. Is everything fine with you?"

He hesitated a moment. "Yes, everything's fine." Even someone with zero knowledge of human emotion or behavior would not have found it a convincing answer.

"On the moon, you said... you said I should not keep things from you. Is the reverse not also true?"

It wasn't, of course, not even remotely. He was a captain and a Starfleet officer, and that meant he needed as much information as possible and decided how much and what information to provide in return. That was how command worked. Rather than attempt to explain this in some way that wouldn't sound like a complete betrayal of the openness he'd asked her for, he deflected and lied, "I'm fine, I'm just tired."

"Is it because you lost your officer?"

Lorca didn't answer.

"I am very sorry that he did not survive. I tried to help him, but the toxins were too spread out, and too many cells were already dead. I wish I could have saved him."

His response to this statement was almost entirely automatic: "It wasn't your fault."

"It is as much mine as anyone's."

It was not the response he expected. "No. It wasn't. Listen, whatever happens, good or bad, none of this is your fault. You didn't ask to be taken from Luluan, and no one's forcing us to help you. You can't blame yourself for what happened to Chen."

There was a long silence. Then she said, "I think you have heard the opposite of my meaning. I did not mean to say that I am blaming myself. Blame is not a lului concept. When I say it is as much my fault as anyone's, what I mean is, we are all factors in each other's lives. We are all responsible, because it is a thousand million tiny interactions which lead us to the place in which we stand. There is no one moment or person who is more responsible for any outcome. Events are a cumulative result of all events which came before them. The death of the officer is as much my fault, as it is yours, as it is anybody's who has ever had an influence on Chen's life. Therefore... 'You can't blame yourself,' captain."

Lorca softened. Leave it to the alien to have an alien perspective on personal responsibility. And it was kind of her to have been concerned, though unnecessary. "Thank you for saying that. Now, if there's nothing else, I really do have to sleep."

"May your sleep be unencumbered, and tomorrow be a brighter day."

"Good night, Lalana. Lorca out."

He took one last, long look at the stars before turning in for the night.


	16. Stay On Target

Two arrows flew through the air in quick succession, and across the room, one of them hit dead center on the target. The other at least hit the target.

The first arrow belonged to Morita, shooting a polyalloy pulley/cam compound bow. The second was Lorca, with a traditional Japanese bow. "You didn't miss," said Morita amiably, offering Lorca his bow back.

"It has good balance," said Lorca, admiring the layered wood and bamboo a moment before making the trade. "Still can't believe you brought that on-board." They were in the largest cargo bay on the ship, rows of supplies pushed aside to provide the longest possible shooting corridor.

"It's only a hankyu. Half-size." She shot off an arrow with the bow and it struck next to the arrow from her compound shot. "A yumi is much larger. And it was a wedding present."

"You make that look so easy."

Morita almost smiled. "Years of practice, sir. My father insisted." As a child, she had resented all the archery practice forced upon her by her father's enthusiasm for cultural history, much preferring phaser weapons, but there was something to be said for the usefulness of knowing traditional ways.

When Lorca had outlined the details of his plan, he had originally called for a sniper rifle, as large as they could locate. Morita had countered, "Why not a bow?" And when she showed Lorca the size of the bow she had in mind, he'd agreed wholeheartedly, with the caveat that he hadn't shot a bow in years. Thus, the cargo bay refresher course.

Returning to the compound bow, Lorca's next shot was very close to dead center. "Think they'll buy it?"

"That we're rich, eccentric hunters with a passion for archery?" asked Morita. "I'm sure they'll agree we're eccentric."

Lorca held himself back from laughing. Everything on the ship was somber and tense now. He needed this plan to work more than ever to restore confidence and remind the crew firsthand the importance of their mission in space.

He lowered his bow and looked at Morita. "How are you holding up?"

She loosed another area. It went a tiny bit wide of center. "Fine, sir."

"Off the record?"

Morita looked over at him, feeling mildly annoyed. She didn't like the idea that her captain doubted her ability to keep it together when she had given him no cause for such concern. "Walter's loss is a blow, but... that's space. We all understand the dangers we signed up for. I miss him, but I'm here to do a job, and I intend to do it. To honor his memory." The last words were directly lifted from the short memorial address Lorca had given the crew that morning.

"If it were possible, I'd sub you out for this next part, but..."

"Is there another expert archer onboard?" said Morita, sharper than she usually addressed him. "Or maybe Captain Georgiou is good with a bow. I hear a lot of aliens can't tell us apart. Off the record."

Lorca pursed his lips and then his eyebrows jerked up momentarily in acceptance. "All right, I deserved that. You're too much a part of this for me to replace you, Reiko. I apologize."

Morita nodded her head in approval of the sentiment, nocked another arrow, and let it fly. It landed dead center on Lorca's target. "Thank you, captain."

They headed to retrieve their arrows for another round. "You should probably get in the habit of calling me Gabriel for the next few days."

"You're probably right... Gabriel." It was hard for Morita to say it. "Actually, Da Hee suggested I invite you to dinner tomorrow night. She can give you some pointers on being my wife." They both heard it at the same time. "Husband," Morita corrected herself breathily, almost amused at the slipup.

Lorca suspected Morita was probably the more decisive of the two in the relationship, and wondered if that same dynamic was going to play out between himself and Morita over the next few days as they faked it for the hunt. The idea didn't particularly bother him. "Tell Daisy I accept."

"I hope you like Korean food."

"I guess we'll find out."

They retook their positions. Lorca took a breath and gently exhaled, loosing his arrow as he did. It hit dead center.

* * *

Preparations for the final phase of the operation continued, but otherwise all was quiet. It wasn't just the shipwide malaise at the knowledge one of their own had fallen. It also felt like the calm before the storm. There was a tenseness in the air, an expectation of something still to come.

At least grief was starting to loosen its stranglehold on the crew's state of mind. There was too much to do on the ship to wallow. The grieving could be sorted into three groups: the first, and largest group, knew Chen only in passing. The sum effect of his death on them was that they were propelled into a state of ready mindfulness, reminded of their own mortality and the dangers of deep space, which would continue for about a week before subsiding back to the previous level of tension they had felt about their lives in deep space prior to the incident. They would be more cautious, and then resume living as they had.

The second group consisted of people who were taking this loss as a chance to project their own self-importance and insecurity onto the situation. They were the most outwardly affected, but almost to a fault, none of them had known Chen very well or suffered anything by his loss other than a glimpse of their own mortality. Their response to his passing was to make it somehow about themselves by pretending they had known Chen—even known him well enough to count him as a friend—and they wanted to make sure those around them knew how much Chen had meant to them and how very sad they were about his passing.

The third group were those select few who actually had known Chen, worked alongside him, and considered him a friend long before he had drawn his final breath. They were the quietest group, because what they felt was an empty gaping hole where Chen had been that would follow them for several months to come, and which they did not as a general rule want to give voice to, lest the hole's presence overwhelm them. While the members of the second group loudly worried about what Chen's death meant to them personally, the third group stood to the side and thought to themselves, "But you didn't even know him. You barely spoke a word to him at any point. This grief shouldn't be yours."

Lorca, of course, belonged to a fourth class of people: the non-grieving. There was nothing he could do about Chen's death at this point. He'd done his bit memorializing Chen and communicating Starfleet's regrets to Chen's family, and now he had other things to worry about, like the transponder.

Arzo had set up the transponder project in engineering where he could easily fall back upon the engineering crew's expertise to make the necessary modifications. When Lorca arrived to inspect their progress, he found them well ahead of schedule and on track to finish the transponder a day early. He listened intently as Arzo outlined the revisions they had made and what would be necessary to operate the device upon reaching Luluan, but his eyes wandered to the middle of the engine room. Billingsley was checking the warp coil field alignment, her magboots clicking faintly along the walkway as she made a good show of performing an entirely superfluous inspection in his eyeline.

To the casual observer, she seemed to be pointedly ignoring Lorca, but she lingered just a little too long at certain spots, shifting her weight and chewing on her finger as she pondered her field modulator for no good reason. Lorca had little trouble remembering what she looked like under the uniform or recalling her affection for biting, which seemed to be the point.

"Good work, Arzo," said Lorca as Arzo finished his project summation. "Chief!"

Billingsley pretended not to know she was being called for, looking around in blatantly feigned confusion before letting her gaze settle onto the captain. "Sir?"

"Would you mind checking the viewscreen in my ready room? I think Russo left something out of alignment."

"Certainly, captain," she said coolly, but with an intense smolder in her half-hooded eyes, and turned back to the warp coil.

Oh, she was good. "Now?" he said pointedly.

Billingsley passed off the field modulator to an ensign who probably should have been running the check in the first place and followed Lorca out.

"Turbolift?"

"Sure."

But when the turbolift arrived, it wasn't empty. Ensign Kerrigan was standing inside. "Bridge?" he said helpfully, looking at the two of them.

"If that's all, I'll get back to engineering, sir," said Billingsley immediately, turning on her heel.

"Thanks, chief," Lorca called after her bitterly. He stepped into the turbolift with a deeply annoyed sigh which Kerrigan mistook as the usual flagrant animosity between the captain and chief engineer. The turbolift hummed to life. "How're things with Lalana?"

Kerrigan seemed almost to startle at the question. "Oh, fine."

"Just 'fine?'" said Lorca, intending it as a joke. Kerrigan seemed almost to shrink in response. Lorca immediately sussed out that he'd stumbled onto something that, while hardly the action he'd been looking for in the turbolift, was at least of interest. "Ensign?"

Kerrigan realized that his lackluster response had been horribly insufficient and blurted out, "It's great, sir! Everything's great!"

"Computer, halt turbolift."

Kerrigan's face fell. He had overcorrected and made it even worse. He stared at Lorca in abject terror, failing to form anything more than a nervous "ah" sound.

After a moment in which it became clear Kerrigan was not going to produce an explanation on his own, Lorca asked, "Is the problem Larsson?" That morning, Lorca had approved a second interspecies project with their lului guest from a most unexpected source: Lieutenant Einar Larsson, a member of Lalana's security detail. The Swede's proposal had been extremely blunt. _I will ask the lului questions about the history of her planet and record what she says without any of the waste of time interpretation bullshit historians do. Also I am the best person to do this because Lalana already knows me and if you ask her she will pick me to do it._ The proposal had even read like Larsson spoke: a monotonous run-on sentence. When questioned, the Swede had admitted to a personal passion for history – minus the "interpretation bullshit" – and Lorca had been sufficiently impressed by Larsson's straightforwardness and confidence to let him go forward with the project despite it being well outside the man's professional wheelhouse. (While some ships had a historical officer posted onboard, the Triton did not.) As a bonus, since Larsson was already assigned to watch Lalana, his project wouldn't entail the redistribution of any more personnel resources than were already being used, and as a final bonus, on some level, Lorca thought Larsson's historical survey was going to be unintentionally hilarious, as the man's proposal had been. Let Starfleet make of that what they would.

Kerrigan looked genuinely surprised to hear the name. "Larsson? No, sir."

So not Larsson, but the poor ensign's responses were practically screaming something was amiss. "So there is a problem."

Kerrigan shook his head frantically. "No, sir. No."

Lorca, already an imposing figure beside the scrawny ensign, drew himself up and crossed his arms. "Ensign, spit it out." There was no mistaking his tone. It would be unwise for Kerrigan to make the captain ask again.

Still, Kerrigan hesitated a moment. His options seemed to consist of being stranded in the turbolift forever with an irate captain or coming clean. He wasn't sure which was worse, but the first prospect clearly presented more immediate peril. "It's... it's not a problem, per se, captain. It's just, she doesn't like me very much. But it hasn't affected the work any, I promise. The next time Starfleet encounters a lului, we will be able to communicate fully." On that point, at least, Kerrigan sounded very confident.

Which was all well and good, but Lorca was more interested in the first part of Kerrigan's statement. "Lalana said she doesn't like you? She likes everyone." Though she had expressed a dislike for crowds, Lorca had never heard Lalana express anything less than ardent enthusiasm for any individual she had met, even ones she shouldn't like, like Peter Bhandary, Margeh, and T'rond'n. She hadn't even seemed particularly put off by Beldehen Venel, a man who was organizing the slaughter of her people for profit.

"She didn't... _say_ it," clarified Kerrigan.

Kerrigan had spent more time with Lalana than anyone else on the ship, and might have gleaned some behavioral cue Lorca had missed. "Then how do you know?"

"Uh..." Kerrigan seemed entirely lost.

"Does she... knock her hands?" Lorca knocked his finger joints together twice in perfect imitation of the way Lalana indicated distress. "Twitch? Vibrate? Change colors?" Kerrigan's head shook back and forth. "Help me out here, Mr. Kerrigan."

Kerrigan pondered a moment. "It's more... what she doesn't do, captain."

"The hand spin?" asked Lorca, thinking he had it, and then realized Lalana didn't always rotate her hands when they were talking, so that couldn't be it, unless she secretly disliked everyone on the entire ship.

"Partly?" said Kerrigan, voice cracking. "It's more like she doesn't look at me. And... and she walks around a lot."

Lorca let that sit in the air a moment. "She walks around the room?"

"Yes, sir."

Lorca gave up. "Computer, resume turbolift." Kerrigan visibly relaxed as the turbolift started to move again. And then Lorca went, "Computer, halt." Kerrigan wanted to die. "I don't think she hates you, ensign. I get the impression, to her, the universe is all sunshine, rainbows, and unicorns. My guess is she hates being stuck in quarters all day. Maybe move your language survey to the gym?"

"The gym? Sure." Kerrigan didn't sound very confident.

Lorca cleared his throat and fixed Kerrigan with a mildly disapproving look.

"I mean, yes, captain!"

Confident he'd solved the issue, Lorca ordered the turbolift to resume once more. It moved all of six inches and the doors opened onto the bridge.

As Lorca relieved Benford and Kerrigan relieved Russo, the young ensign thought to himself, _Sunshine, rainbows, and unicorns? Really?_ He couldn't think of what words might actually be used to describe his impressions of Lalana, but he was certain it wasn't those.

* * *

Lorca was pacing when the comms beeped. "Incoming transmission from the Shenzhou," reported Kerrigan. "Personal for you, sir."

"I'll take it in the ready room," said Lorca automatically, wondering what it signified.

Quite a lot, it turned out. After the brief exchange of pleasantries, Captain Georgiou went right to the point and informed him of Starfleet Command's request for her thoughts on the Triton and its captain. "I only thought it right to inform you, Gabriel, and let you know what I said in the report." She was, as always, measured, calm, and magnanimous. Every bit the legendary captain.

"Thank you, Philippa," said Lorca calmly. It was the first time he'd ever addressed her so familiarly, but inwardly his thoughts were roiling. "I appreciate it."

Georgiou's smile seemed somehow grim in light of the seriousness of their conversation, but it softened slightly. "And perhaps one day I will get to meet your alien. Lt. Saru was very impressed with her."

The phrasing jumped out at Lorca. He sniffed in dismissive amusement. "Oh, she's not my alien," he said casually, as if he hadn't a care in the world. "She just happens to be on my ship."

Georgiou's smile gave way to a small laugh. "Well said, captain. Good luck on your mission." The transmission terminated on the other end.

 _Luck has nothing to do with it_ , Lorca thought, jaw tightening in anger. He grabbed the foam ball on his desk and threw it against the wall. It bounced off, harmless and totally unsatisfying. Damn that Walter Chen.

Every remaining step of this mission was going to need to go off without a hitch, or else.


	17. As You Like It

By the time dinner arrived, Lorca had set aside the gnawing anger at Starfleet Command and Chen and pushed it far enough outside of his mind to be in a pleasant enough mood to not make a complete asshole of himself. It wasn't just that this was the responsible and polite thing to do. He actually found himself looking forward to the meal. Despite having witnessed Morita voluntarily eat emergency rations, she and her wife had a reputation as foodies, and according to rumor, a seat at their table was guaranteed to be the best meal on the ship—even better than dining in the captain's mess.

To further improve the chances of an entirely satisfactory evening, Lorca dropped by the cargo bay and picked up a bottle of the blue stuff they'd confiscated from some illicit traders last month. He arrived at Morita's shared quarters with it in hand.

Morita's wife answered the door. Lieutenant Da Hee Yoon (or Daisy, as she was also called) was the ship's resident botanist. She was in charge of the hydroponics bay, though her actual area of expertise was in soil biomes. Taking the assignment on the Triton had been a sacrifice for her, as the ship's patrol and transport mission didn't tend to involve stepping onto many strange new worlds, but she had made that sacrifice to remain with Morita and seemed more than happy to have done so. She had shoulder-length layered honey-brown hair and dark brown eyes that lit up at the sight of the bottle. "That stuff's potent, you know!"

It had seemed like there were a couple of bottles missing from the crate. "You telling me you've had it already?"

Yoon smiled coyly. "Of course not, no one on the crew would ever steal an illegal bottle of alcohol and pass it around. Same as the captain wouldn't take a whole bottle for himself."

Lorca gave a small snort of amusement. "Give me some credit. This bottle's for all of us. So long as we understand each other, lieutenant."

"Perfectly, sir!" Yoon took the bottle and invited him inside. "And please, call me Daisy while you're in our home."

"Gabriel," offered Lorca, rendering permission for the offer to be returned.

Morita and Yoon's quarters were bigger than most. They had the combination of Morita's rank and position as a security chief and their status as a married couple to dictate their assigned lodgings, which afforded them the space for a very nice personal dining table with a real wood top that could seat four comfortably and could have fit six had not most of its surface been occupied by an array of covered dishes. (The table reminded Lorca of the dining table in Georgiou's captain's mess. He quickly shoved that thought out of his mind, not wanting to let the content of his recent conversation with Georgiou color his mood.)

The place smelled amazing. Morita was finishing setting the table. Both she and Yoon were dressed in casual clothes, making Lorca odd man out in his uniform. Morita, in her terse fashion, hadn't specified a dress code. (Even if she had, Lorca preferred his uniform, especially when walking the Triton's corridors.)

Yoon cracked the bottle. "We're just waiting on one more," she said, handing him a shot glass of the ale and pouring matching glasses for herself and Morita.

Morita hadn't mentioned that information, either. Lorca wondered who the hell was coming, and what he had inadvertently walked into. Was this a setup? An ambush? It had better not be a blind date. He hoped for Benford. That would be the most painless option possible at this point.

The door chimed. It wasn't Benford.

"I am sorry I am late," came the all-too-familiar voice, "I am still working on the concept of scheduled times. Ensign Kerrigan said people usually 'dress up' for dinner invitations. I hope this was appropriate." Lalana stepped inside.

Lorca almost dropped his drink.

From the top of her head, she was a brilliant vermillion hue, which at her shoulders began to fade into a deep eggplant purple. Faint dustings of silver dotted the fur on her torso in a pattern resembling the spots of a hyena. The communicator she had been issued (primarily as a means of locating her) hung from a black strap around her neck. Only her eyes remained unchanged. They were as bright a green as ever.

"Of course!" said Yoon, clearly delighted. "Those colors, they're just gorgeous."

"You look stunning," said Lorca. It was impossible for him to hide how impressed he was with the display. He'd seen Lalana do solid colors and natural textures, but nothing like this. Lalana immediately began to spin her hands with happiness at the compliment. "No one told me it was fancy dress," he quipped.

Yoon smiled and almost laughed. "The only thing you need to eat at my table is an open mind and an empty stomach." Then she showed them to their seats. It was clear she was the hostess of the couple: she was warm and friendly, leading the conversation effortlessly. "Lalana's been assisting me in hydroponics. Did you know she can tell the composition of soil just by tasting it?"

Lorca looked at Lalana with a knowing smile. "Somehow I'm not surprised." Lalana clicked her tongue mirthfully.

Yoon's eyes were twinkling mischievously. "So, Gabriel, how spicy can you handle your food?"

He recalled the joke about the seat warmers. "Thermonuclear."

Yoon laughed. "We'll see about that! Dig in." She and Morita began uncovering dishes.

Fish, pork, beef, vegetables, and things Lorca couldn't identify at first glance appeared. They'd really gone all out. There was so much food, Lorca could scarcely decide where to start, but Morita immediately went for something he recognized: mottled brown slices of blood sausage. "Sundae," she identified it.

"The Spanish version is morsee... Morsee..." Yoon's brow furrowed as she tried to remember it.

"Morcilla," supplied Lorca, allowing Morita to serve him. She supplied a small dish of orange-tinted salt to go with it while Yoon served Lalana. (Though Yoon had set a variety of utensils out for their guests, it was clear Lalana was more comfortable with her tongue, which was largely inappropriate from a human perspective where serving food was concerned. Even if it was sonically clean on a cellular level.)

Lorca went with the chopsticks out of deference to his hosts' own preference. The sausage was moist and warm, with a simple purity to the mixture of meat and glutinous rice. Adding a pinch of salt made the flavors explode onto his tongue, revealing an unexpected depth of seasoning. Lalana pressed her tongue against the slice on her plate, decided it was edible, and happily scooped it up bit by bit. She seemed to like it.

The mess of things sat in red sauce to Lorca's left was entirely unfamiliar. "Ddeok bok gi," said Yoon. "Sticky rice cake. With some fish cake and vegetables, in red pepper sauce. Not too spicy. Honestly, it's not very a fancy spread, but these are all my favorite foods."

The thick, tube-shaped rice cake was hard to pick up with chopsticks. Morita reached over, took Lorca's hand, and adjusted his position slightly. She'd done something similar the previous day at the start of the archery practice, adjusting his shooting form, but it somehow felt more intimate in this setting. "Try now."

It was a marked improvement. He found the smooth, chewy, almost creamy gumminess of the rice cake paired well with the heat of the sauce. He also discovered "not too spicy" translated to "this is fairly spicy," but it was an entirely satisfying level of heat that left his tongue tingling.

While he worked his way through the various foods within reach, particularly enjoying the marinated short rib, Lalana peppered Yoon with questions about everything. Yoon seemed more than happy to explain what the foods were and where they had come from and how they were cooked, which Lalana seemed to find quite the novelty, since her species didn't cook things. She pointed her tail at a whole grilled fish. "Is that like an anchovy?" she asked.

"Yes, that's mackerel! It's another kind of fish." Yoon beamed, pleased to have such an attentive culinary student. Lalana declared the mackerel very good, then inquired as to whether there were any anchovies available. Yoon immediately went to fetch some.

"Anchovies?" Lorca echoed.

"Yes, Yoon was eating some, and I asked to try them, and I liked them so much, she invited me to dinner." That explained that, then.

A bowl of tiny, salted and dried silver fish joined the table. Lalana grabbed several at once with her tail. _Tiny, shining fish_ , thought Lorca, feeling a momentary pang of regret in his chest.

Thankfully, Yoon's bright enthusiasm quickly distracted Lorca before the pang could turn into anything more. "Oh!" she said, taking a small bowl from behind a pot of beef stew and putting it between her and Lalana, "I almost forgot. For our guest of honor. This is beondegi!"

The dish contained some sort of murky brown liquid with small, darker brown shapes inside. Lorca squinted at it. Some kind of soup with nuts?

Lalana's hands immediately begin spinning with joy, because while Lorca didn't know what "beondegi" meant, the translator had provided it in very clear terms to her. "Human bugs!" she exclaimed.

Lorca didn't bother to hide his surprise. "And here I thought I was the guest of honor," he cracked, feigning exasperation. Lalana clicked her tongue and lightly batted his arm with her tail, to Lorca's considerable amusement. His shoulders shook with quiet laughter.

"You were a last-minute addition," said Morita. It wasn't quite to the level of being a real joke, but it was good to hear Morita come close. It was a sign she was starting to finally relax.

Lalana plucked the bugs from her plate and put them in her mouth, evidently finding them palatably edible. Yoon was eating them, too, seemingly pleased to have someone to share this treat with, because Morita made absolutely no indication she intended to do the same.

"They're not 'human bugs,'" Lorca lightly corrected Lalana. "They're Earth bugs. There's nothing human about them."

"Do you want some?" Lalana asked.

Yoon attempted to answer on her captain's behalf, "Oh, I don't think Gabriel..."

"Sure," said Lorca, holding out his plate.

Yoon looked at Morita, then down at the beondegi, and went along with it, meting out a few as a sample. "Okay, it's a little... different," she warned, passing the plate back.

Morita picked up her shot glass. "To boldly go," she said.

"To boldly go," echoed Lorca, clinking his glass to hers and finishing it off. Not that he needed any liquid courage. He thrived on adventure, and this was just a different sort. He managed to pick up one of the pupae with the chopsticks and chewed it thoughtfully.

Different was an understatement. In terms of texture, there was a bit of crunch from the outer carapace, a sponginess inside, and a sort of overall grittiness. In terms of taste it was much harder to describe. Unable to pin it down from just one sample, Lorca ate another. It was savory and somehow reminded him of tree bark, not that he was in the habit of eating tree bark. He went for a third one. Maybe there was something faintly resembling coffee to the taste? A mild sweetness? Each one of the little bugs seemed to have a slight variance in flavor. There was a bit of aftertaste, too, which wasn't totally unpleasant. Just odd.

Everyone was staring at him, waiting for a verdict. "Huh. I don't know if I like it, but it's not bad."

"He's a keeper," Yoon quipped to Morita.

"What does that mean, a keeper?" asked Lalana. Yoon explained, leading Lalana to conclude, "Yes, I would like to keep the captain, too." Yoon realized she hadn't accurately conveyed the romantic connotations and tried to further explain, which was an amusing conversation to listen to while eating.

Lorca noticed Morita was watching him intently. "Something on your mind, Reiko?" In response, Morita squinted, reached over, took the chopsticks away from him, and put a fork in his hand. Lorca winced. "Come on, I was doing fine."

"It was like watching a bird," she said. To be precise, her mental picture had been of a heron picking at crabs along the shore, and if she had allowed him to continue at that pace, dinner might have gone on forever. She pushed another dish towards him. "Besides, corn cheese is much easier with a fork of spoon."

Lorca rolled his eyes in mild annoyance, but completely forgave her a moment later because corn cheese turned out to be the most perfect combination of corn, cheese, and creaminess imaginable. "How have I not had this before." He pulled the dish closer to his plate, apparently claiming it all for himself.

"May I try that?" asked Lalana. Despite the territorial act, Lorca spooned a serving onto her plate without hesitation. She tasted it and, as usual, concluded, "I like it!"

"Is there anything you don't like?" said Lorca with a snort, then remembered Kerrigan's turbolift confession. "Actually, Kerrigan thought you didn't like him. How crazy is that?"

Lalana stared at Lorca and pressed her knuckles together.

"What?"

"I don't like Ensign Kerrigan."

Lorca stared, genuinely surprised as he tried to reconcile this statement with his own experiences with Lalana. Seeing the expression on his face (and already well into her second shot of Romulan ale), Yoon tittered and stifled a giggle.

"The one person you don't like is Ensign Kerrigan?" he said with mild disbelief. Lalana continued staring. "Explain."

"He talks too much."

That was rich, coming from Lalana, of all people. In the time Lorca had known Lalana, she had done almost nothing but talk, often at great length and in tremendous detail. "He's just trying to learn your language. Talking's part of it."

"Oh, not, I quite like the discussion about words. What I do not like are the constant interruptions."

"I'm sure it's just part of the process."

"Nnnnnn," hummed Lalana, as if Lorca weren't quite getting it, "I do not think it was necessary for translation purposes that I should have to hear about his childhood 'dog.' Or his... 'vintage comic collection.'"

Lorca started laughing. The thought of Lalana sat there, trapped, listening to Kerrigan ramble about old comics, was too perfect. "Okay. I'll have a word with him," he said, shaking his head. "If he invites you to the gym, just go along with it."

Lalana tilted her head to the side. "What did you do?"

"What makes you think I did anything?"

"That was oddly specific," pointed out Morita.

Lorca put his hands flat on the table and leaned back. The ladies had completely boxed him in. Not that he minded; if he did, he wouldn't have let them. "I said you probably didn't like being cooped up all day long. Was I wrong?" He looked at her for confirmation.

Lalana stared at him intently. "Even when you are wrong, you are right."

It wasn't quite "most things on your face," but Lorca appreciated the sentiment all the same. He snorted. "I am, aren't I?"

"I'm sure Kerrigan's not so bad," said Yoon, who didn't know him personally and had heard a few things, but tended to think the best of people. "He probably wants to make a good impression and tries a little too hard. Most ensigns do. I certainly did." At this admission, Morita reached over and put her hand on Yoon's, smiling with loving pride.

Lalana cheerfully countered, "I have spent six hours a day with him almost every day I have been on the ship. I would not mind his digressions if he were someone I wanted to know about, but I can find nothing of interest in any of the things he says."

It was the meanest thing Lorca had ever heard her say. "Not one thing?"

"Nnnn. No. Do you think he is interesting?"

"God, no!" went Lorca, bursting into laughter again. "He's so boring!" He continued laughing and Lalana clicked her tongue rapidly, equally amused to discover the captain shared her opinion.

"Okay," said Yoon, trying to contain her own laughter, "let's not all pile onto the poor ensign." Even Morita was smiling slightly.

Lorca raised a hand in surrender. "You're right, Daisy. Kerrigan is hereby banned from the conversation."

"The less said about him, the better," said Morita.

"Now where have I heard that before?" smirked Lorca, helping himself to some more of the marinated beef.

They continued swapping dishes across the table, samples flying freely across plates. Lorca even went for a couple more silkworm pupa, trying to sate his need to pinpoint the finer details of the experience. One of the last dishes to be revealed was a whole segment of octopus tentacle, which turned out to contain an extra surprise for table. Performing her usual taste test, Lalana suddenly vibrated, startling both Lorca and Yoon.

"What is this! This, this—" It took some doing to calm her down to the point that she was able to explain her reaction. Apparently, out of all the foods on the table, the octopus most resembled something from her own world. "I love it!"

"Here," said Lorca, moving a piece of octopus from his plate onto hers.

Lalana curled her tail around his left arm and squeezed lightly in gratitude. "Thank you!" Eating the piece, she vibrated again, this time rippling like she had that very first day in sickbay when he had help her remove the restrictive jumpsuit. He filed away another observation: head-to-tail ripple equaled joy.

Lalana wasn't the sole focus of the mealtime chatter. Yoon also made good on the promised marital tips. She seemed to know everything there was about Morita in great detail, relaying (among other things) how Lorca might earn Morita's favor by plying the security chief's sweet tooth with sugar candies, and how Morita always remembered to bring Yoon a small gift of soil from any planet she set foot on. It was clear the two loved each other deeply. "Now, Reiko hates being rushed, so if she has to make a decision, don't try and force it. You can't rush perfection."

Lorca glanced at Morita, who looked mildly annoyed, but in a way that betrayed the fact she was secretly pleased someone knew and appreciated her so completely.

"Also, she won't go to sleep unless everyone else has, and don't interrupt her when she's reading! That's very important. I made that mistake the day we met. Oh! Did you think of a story for how you two met, or do you want to steal ours?"

"We met at an agrichemical convention on Cerros," said Morita smoothly, as if this were something that had actually happened and not a facet of their carefully crafted cover personas. The decision to make the Lopezs manufacturer/distributors of pesticides and fertilizers allowed Morita to draw upon the knowledge of soil and horticulture she'd picked up from Yoon. "I was there to sell, he was one of the buyers."

Lorca chimed in his part of the backstory with equal ease. "I bought four hundred thousand tons of fertilizer just to get her to have dinner with me."

Morita rolled her eyes. "He overpaid."

"I think it was quite the bargain," said Lorca, smiling with boyish charm. He reached over for Morita's hand and she gave it to him without hesitation. "Love at first purchase order."

Yoon blinked in wide-eyes amazement. "Oh, wow. You guys are good. I'd buy it, and I know better."

Lorca chuckled, releasing Morita's hand. "Thank you, Daisy."

Lalana tilted her head to the side and asked, "Why do you call Da Hee 'Daisy?'"

Lorca let Yoon answer. "Daisy is my English name. It's so people who speak English can have an easier time."

"I don't mind using 'Da Hee' instead," said Lorca.

Daisy waved her hand dismissively. "It's fine. I grew up in Los Angeles. More people call me Daisy than anything else."

"Then I should call you Daisy?" asked Lalana.

"Use whichever name you want. I mean, I'm sure our names aren't easy for you to say."

"That is true, human names are very difficult."

"Actually," interjected Lorca, "I've been wondering something. Computer. Disable lului to English translation."

"Lilulalulolulenlulalulanluen?" went Lalana immediately. "Leylulalulelo! Laluloan! Hlah-hlen!"

"Ah!" Lorca raised a hand for her to stop. "I want to hear you speak English." And he suspected he just had; her last word seemed to have the exact cadence of a rather alarmed intonation of "Captain! _"_

"La... Hla-t tu yluan ni tu say?"

Lorca looked delighted. "What do I want you to say? Start with our names."

"Da Hee," said Lalana, perfectly intelligible. "Day-si." Though the S in the word "say" had been perfectly formed, the one in "Daisy" had a vague lisp to it. She moved on to Morita. "Rei-to Hnorita. ... MUH-ri-ta." Since the M required her to close her mouth, it seemed she had to pause and reset to make the sound.

Lorca waited expectantly, but Lalana stopped and started tapping her fingers in distress.

"Oh, come on," said Lorca. "It can't be that bad."

"Hlit is... hlayli bad." It is very bad. Lalana looked downward. "Hay... Hay-pliel... Hay-buh-ri-el... Lor-hla." She dropped her tail over her eyes.

"Captain," chided Yoon, dropping his title in as an admonishment, "you're embarrassing her. Computer, reenable lului translation." The computer beeped its compliance. "I'm so sorry, Lalana."

"That was amazing," said Lorca, delighted, but Lalana didn't move her tail. He nudged her shoulder with his elbow supportively. "I mean it."

"It was not amazing," she said, returned to perfect computer pronunciation. "It was very poor."

"Actually, Gabriel has a point, that was impressive," said Yoon. "It's not like we know any of your language!"

"Lallen, lelulallen," said Lorca, counting them off on his fingers. "Lelli. Ah, what was that other one... lily-something." Not that he could have constructed a sentence. It wasn't even clear that lului had discrete sentences in it; it sounded like an endless stream of syllables. (This was more accurate than he knew. As the much-maligned Ensign Kerrigan could attest, the lului language was a stream-of-consciousness arrangement of modifiers that flowed without pause. It was why Lalana's words sometimes seemed to continue incessantly.)

Lalana's tail slid up from her eyes. "Liliann! You remember that?"

Lorca shrugged at her. Of course he did; he'd noted the details of their every interaction with the same level of meticulous calculation he applied to everything. With hands spinning, Lalana flipped her tail from her own head over to his.

"Lalana! You know I hate this!" he laughed, but made no move to stop her, nor was there any indication on his face that his protest was in any way genuine. The tingling sensation of her skin filaments was odd, but eminently endurable and not completely unenjoyable, much like beondegi. About the only real complaint that could be made was that because she was room temperature, her tendrils felt mildly cool to the touch.

"Then this is only fair," she said, clicking her tongue.

He threw up a hand in surrender. "Okay, I won't make you speak English again. I promise." Her tail slid away across his and he wiped his hand across the spot instinctively, grinning.

Lalana leaned forward against the table, gripping it with her hands. "Why do you need so many languages on your planet? Why is one not enough?" she asked intently.

"It's not that we _need_ more than one, we _have_ more than one," Lorca clarified. "It's a big planet."

"But, you are all one species. What does the planet's size have to do with it?"

Lorca inhaled thoughtfully to answer, but Yoon beat him to the punch. "Humans are adventurous. We settled every corner of the world many thousands of years ago, and different regions ended up with different languages over time. Just gradually changing, a word here, a word there, and finally, the people on one side of the planet couldn't understand the people on the other."

"That quickly?"

"Quickly?" echoed Lorca. "It took tens of thousands of years."

Morita had been quietly thinking about what she knew of linguistic history. Latin and German had diverged into many different languages in Europe over the course of mere centuries, and she remembered hearing a recording of how English had sounded in Shakespeare's day and how different it was from English at the start of the modern era. "It only takes a few hundred years to end up with a new language," she concluded. "Or dialect, at least." Some dialects were virtually unintelligible to speakers of the same language.

Lorca decided the problem must be Lalana's unfamiliarity with the length of a year. Perhaps it could be best demonstrated by an example based on her old experience. "How old were you when the Dartarans caught you?"

"Seven."

"That young?" He was surprised yet again, even though it made a sort of sense. A juvenile lului was probably easier to catch than an adult. "And how old are you now?"

"I am still seven."

Lorca completely lost the point he was about to make. He inhaled as if to speak, squinted thoughtfully, and wondered what was getting lost in translation.

Noting his expression, Lalana said, "It hasn't even been a half of a half of a half of a half of a cycle." The lului affection for measuring things in halves was not doing anyone any favors at that moment. Absolutely none of the humans at the table managed to keep track of how many halves that was. (Which, in all fairness, was partly the point: the redundancy of halves was a lului linguistic colloquialism indicating exactly how small and meaningless something was. It was not the way the number would have been expressed in a mathematical sense.)

"Wait, what?" said Yoon. "How long is your planet's orbit?"

"I am not sure exactly. Our planet's orbit is not very remarkable. We use a comet to measure time. It comes every thirty thousand days."

Morita put down her chopsticks. "Computer, how many years is thirty thousand days?"

"Thirty thousand days is eighty-two point two years," responded the computer.

"Your days are not the same length as ours," said Lalana. "If I had to estimate, let me think. A lului day is about half as much longer than a Dartaran day. Two thousand, six hundred Dartaran days is one thousand seven hundred lului days, and six years... I am around eight hundred of your years old. How old are you?"

Yoon gaped. "Twenty... nine?" Morita was thirty-two, and Lorca topped out the humans at forty.

"How long do humans live?"

Still processing this new information, Lorca said, "A hundred years if we're lucky." Not that he expected any of them to be that lucky. It was a common enough thing to live to be a hundred given the advances made in medical technology, but still far from a guarantee, and Starfleet had a way of shortening life expectancies, as everyone knew well enough at this point.

"Barely enough time for one cycle! Well, the next comet comes in twenty-five of your years, so then you will all be one cycle of age, if you come to Luluan to see it."

"Twenty-five year reunion?" proposed Lorca.

Yoon laughed and raised her glass. "Let's do it!" They drank a toast to that.

Morita remained bothered by one of Lorca's comments about language. "You said... You said we don't need more than one language, but there are words in Japanese that can't be expressed in English."

"Oh?"

" _Kuyashii_ is one." The word had been on Morita's mind ever since Chen's passing.

"That's a good point," said Yoon, putting down her glass and jumping in before Morita could define what precisely kuyashii was and why it was important. "We're all speaking English, but that doesn't mean it's a perfect language. So maybe we do need more than one."

Lorca crossed his arms, pondering the merits of the counterargument. While English wasn't perfect, it was generally viewed as easy to learn and took in loanwords from most other languages with relative ease. It was widespread partly because of how well it tolerated linguistic imperfection. There were better languages, sure, but at this point, it seemed unlikely humanity was going to pick another to rally behind.

"And do you have names in all of the human languages?" asked Lalana.

Yoon shook her head. "No. Just Korean and English. Having a name in a different language is the exception, not the rule. It's really only if you interact with people from very different cultures on a regular basis."

"Then, do I need a name in English?"

"Do you want one?" asked Lorca, helping himself to some more of the beef.

Lalana looked at him with her enormous green eyes. "Yes, please."

Lorca glanced at Morita and Yoon for input. "Lana? Elena?" he suggested. Both were very similar to Lalana, particularly on paper, though the vowel sounds were shifted different ways in both, and the stresses weren't quite the same.

"Eleanor!" said Yoon suddenly. "It sort of has the 'luh-nuh' sound at the end. And, I mean, Eleanor Roosevelt?"

"Who is 'Eleanor Roosevelt?'" That merited an explanation which Lalana seemed to find very satisfactory. "It sounds like she was an excellent human. I would be honored to take this name."

"Then it's settled. To Eleanor!" declared Yoon. This was maybe too many toasts over a short period of time. Lorca sensibly declined to have his glass refilled and instead took another helping from the plate of beef. "You really like the galbi, don't you?"

"Is that what you call this?"

Slowly but surely, and somehow, most of the food on the table was disappearing. They were reaching the point where it was becoming necessary to pick and choose what foods to fill the remaining space in their stomachs with, because no way was it all going to fit.

Ever the consummate host, Yoon didn't allow for any lulls in conversation. She happily recounted how she and Morita had met on a blind date at a café set up by a mutual friend. Morita arrived early, Yoon late, and Morita had been reading to pass the time. The first thing Yoon did was interrupt Morita's reading and ask about the book, which turned out to be "a manual on phaser maintenance procedures," and Morita had been most annoyed at the interruption. "But then this song came on, and I got up to dance!" said Yoon. "I asked Reiko if she danced, and she said..."

"'Only where it's appropriate,'" supplied Morita, smirking. This was a story they had told together many times before.

"So we went to a club instead and stayed out all night long dancing!"

As usual, Lalana had questions about every single detail: what was a café, what was a club, and more importantly, what were songs and dancing?

"How has that not come up in the language survey?" demanded Lorca, breaking the "no Kerrigan" rule, but feeling entirely justified in doing so at this point.

It had come up in the survey, but, in accordance with established protocol, Kerrigan had deemed it more important to get as many lului words as possible into the database rather than waste time defining concepts lului did not have. Still. Apparently vintage comic books merited an aside, but the wealth of culture that was music did not. Lorca covered his face in his hands and growled softly, wondering how much of his desire to kill Kerrigan right now was genuine and how much was the alcohol talking. Fifty-fifty, he guessed.

"We did go over all the lului words for different types of sounds," offered Lalana. "We have many of those. Music is a sequence of sounds? What exactly is its purpose?"

"How do you not know music?" asked Yoon, the third time she had wondered this aloud in the past five minutes.

"They don't have any instruments," said Lorca, sighing and pulling his hands down his face. "And Dartarans hate music." Something about their lizard ear sensitivity to certain vibrations. He decided to pour himself some more ale after all.

"But, singing!" Yoon cried. Lalana stared blankly. Yoon almost shouted, "Computer, music!" without specifying a type. The computer defaulted to one of her go-to songs.

A piano flourish played. Lalana startled in her chair, her tail darting over to Lorca's arm and her backside momentarily shifting a shade towards the color of her seat before she overcame her surprise and shifted it back to the robust purple hue. When the lyrics began a moment later, she pressed her tail against Lorca's arm in further surprise, but remained otherwise still.

" _At first I was afraid, I was petrified. Kept thinking I could never live without you by my side. But then I spent so many nights thinking how you did me wrong_..."

"C'mon, I'll show you how to dance," said Yoon, extending her hand to Lalana. The pressure on Lorca's arm let up as Lalana accepted the invitation and left the table.

Lorca watched with shameless curiosity as Yoon demonstrated the basics. Lalana seemed to take to it quite easily, at least where moving in accordance to the beat was concerned. It would doubtless take some effort to figure out an actual set of dance moves designed for her physiology. For now, Yoon did most of the moving, and Lalana mimicked what she could and seemed to enjoy it regardless.

"Gabriel?" Morita's voice drew his attention. She was making an invitation of her own. "Or can you not dance?" That had to be alcohol talking. There was no way Morita would have ever dared challenge her captain otherwise.

Morita had moves, it turned out, and managed to somewhat dismantle the awkwardness of such a small group dancing by not taking the exercise very seriously at first and doing everything she could to elicit a laugh. By the time the first song ended and transitioned into the unfamiliar, vaguely whimsical, funky beat of the next, Lorca was disarmed enough to offer no protest when Morita slid in closer for a more typical demonstration of human dance habits. Lorca played along up to a point. While Yoon gave no indication of any jealousy, he was still perfectly cognizant of the fact he was dancing with someone else's wife.

When the second song ended and the intro began for a third, Morita practically pushed Lorca back to the table, then swept in and stole Yoon from Lalana with an entirely insincere apology. Lalana settled back into the seat beside Lorca and he said, "I think we've been jilted."

"And least we are 'jilted' together," said Lalana reasonably, gripping the back of the chair with her hands as she watched Morita and Yoon. The song's vocals started. Lorca recognized them, but couldn't actually place the song title until the words "West End Girls" appeared, which cleared things up entirely.

It was obvious Yoon had greatly simplified her dance techniques for Lalana's benefit, and as good as Morita had been with Lorca, with Yoon, she was even better. The two seemed to instinctually know what to do together with the sort of ease that only came from hours and hours of shared experience. They were perfectly in sync.

There was nothing quite like watching two women dance. Lorca pressed his hand to his chin, idly running a finger across his lips, thoroughly enjoying the little show, even though it clearly wasn't for his benefit.

The song ended and Morita stopped the computer from playing another. Lorca provided mild applause as Morita and Yoon sat back down. "And that," said Yoon, flushed and happy, "is dancing!"

"That is wonderful!" said Lalana in appreciation.

Morita leaned forward and fixed them all with a serious look. "Now, no more distractions. Eat!"

In the wake of Lalana's first time dancing, the conversation turned to other firsts: first kisses, first assignments, first time setting foot on another planet. Yoon turned out to have set foot on another planet at the youngest age, courtesy a school trip to the surface of Mars, but Lorca had the clear record for earliest first kiss, even when Morita declared his initial first kiss to be "totally schoolyard" and switched the parameters to first kiss with tongue. "Man, you were precocious," Morita concluded, and Lorca couldn't disagree.

"Better than the alternative," grumbled Yoon, whose first kiss hadn't been until she was seventeen.

"Ah, it's nothing to be ashamed of," said Lorca. "I think it's sweet."

"Oh my god," squeaked Yoon, blushing furiously. "That is not a compliment!" Lorca laughed.

Lalana had gone generally quiet, not having any first assignment or first kiss to contribute, and her first time on another planet had obviously been when she was kidnapped by the Dartarans. Admittedly these had not be the best choices of topic for their guest, but at this point, none of the humans at the table were in a "best choices" frame of mind. Lorca attempted to fix the issue. "Look at us blathering. We're probably boring Lalana worse than Kerrigan."

"I would not say 'worse than,'" Lalana volunteered, and they all had a good laugh. "I have been wondering, why is it that your planet is named for another word for dirt?"

"Because dirt is amazing!" cried Yoon, launching into a passionate spiel about the merits of soil that did very little to answer the question, but made it abundantly clear she truly enjoyed her work. It was the first topic of conversation Lorca found generally boring, but he listened with half an ear in case the information proved useful in the coming days. Lalana seemed to find it very interesting, even if part of her focus was clearly on securing all those dishes that still had any real quantity of food left so she could finish them off. The only thing she had declared inedible to her species was the Romulan ale.

Lorca surveyed the table. It looked like a grand battle had been fought upon its surface, and against tremendous odds, they had won. Empty dishes were strewn across the battlefield like vanquished soldiers. He put a hand on his stomach and decided it was going to take weeks to undo this damage, but it had definitely been worth it. As Yoon finished her treatise on the wonderful world of all things earthy, Lorca asked a question of his own: "How the hell did you manage to get all this food? Is there anything left in the mess?"

"Oh, I have my ways," said Yoon, intending to be mysterious. She lacking the willpower to follow through on that intent and immediately blurted, "They give you all sorts of space when you're in charge of hydroponics."

"Ye-uhp," said Lorca curtly. "Space for hydroponic supplies."

Yoon was too tipsy to take this judgment seriously. "Yes, well, if you tell anyone, you'll never be invited here again! No more galbi for you!"

Lorca shook his head, amused. "Your secret is safe with me," he promised. "So I take it I'm getting invited back?"

"Absolutely! So long as Reiko doesn't die on this little mission of—" Yoon broke off and gasped, realizing what she'd said. She covered her mouth with her hands. "Oh! Oh, no. I'm so sorry." Tears sprang to her eyes. "I'm so sorry, I didn't mean... I didn't mean that!"

Morita was frozen with shock. Lorca decided the best thing to do would be to end dinner right then and there, but before he could manufacture a line that would accomplish this with minimal anguish, Lalana began to speak.

"The universe is an infinitely big place. There are so many people on so many worlds, to be able to meet one single person out of all that infinity is the result of a hundred, thousand, million, trillion tiny events that bring us together."

Lorca recognized the sentiment from his earlier conversation with Lalana, but as she went on, he discovered the concept had been repurposed in a new context. It was no longer a statement about personal responsibility and blame.

"That you were able to meet and know Walter Chen was and still is a miracle. One single difference in any point in the past and this would have been impossible. I did not know Walter Chen myself, but from what I have been told, Walter Chen would not have wanted to change a single step in his journey because every step brought him to the point where he met you, and meeting you made him happy. I am also certain that it was not his wish for either of you to be saddened by his passing. He was a very funny man, and he delighted in seeing people smile and laugh. Having seen smiles and laughter myself, I think I understand very well Walter Chen's affection for these things. Did you know Walter Chen once removed all of the internal pins from Einar's rifle so when he picked it up for you to inspect, it fell apart in his hands? Chen did that just to see you smile."

Tears were streaming down Yoon and Morita's faces, but hearing the details of Chen's prank, Morita let out a small sob and smiled despite her sadness. "That was Walter?" She wiped the tears from her eyes. A gasp of laughter escaped. "That was Walter!" As tragic as the situation was, knowing that fact seemed to give Morita some comfort. She reached for Yoon's hand. Yoon reciprocated, glad her slip of the tongue was forgiven.

Not wanting to be completely upstaged by Lalana, Lorca raised his glass. "One last toast," he said. "To Walter Chen."

* * *

They talked a little longer, about archery and Earth and Starfleet, but the damage was done. Morita began to clear the plates and Yoon escorted them to the door. Lorca clasped her hand at the threshold and said with all sincerity, "Thank you again. That was wonderful."

Yoon wrinkled her nose. "I hope you'll forgive what I said. About... you know."

With full understanding of the danger of what he was about to say and how very wrong it was to make a promise he might not be able to keep, Lorca gave her hand a squeeze and said, "I promise you, Daisy, I'll bring Reiko back alive and in one piece."

"Thank you, captain," said Yoon, eyes starting to water again. "And you!" She dropped down to her knees so she was almost the same height as Lalana and threw her arms around the lului, nestling her cheek against Lalana's fur. "Thank you so much for coming. And for what you said."

Lalana seemed unsure what to do at first, then curled her tail around Yoon's shoulders. "I realize it is sad for you and Reiko, but always remember how impossible it was that you knew him in the first place. The universe is so big and there are so many people. Knowing any one single person is what you call a 'miracle.'"

Yoon smiled and gave Lalana one final squeeze. "You have such a long perspective," she declared as she drew back.

"It is not the length which is important, but how it is used," replied Lalana. Yoon and Lorca both stared, not quite certain they believed they ears. Lalana noticed their confusion, perhaps because it was an emotion she was encountering a lot of, and clarified, "This is a lului saying we have which means the things that you do are more important than the length of your tail or your tongue, but because time is using same word as distance in English, this can be applied to age I think?"

"Sure," said Lorca in a somewhat judgmental tone. Lalana had completely misunderstood their confusion.

"Well, goodnight," said Yoon, wide-eyed, and retreated back inside her quarters.

It was late and the hallways were presently deserted. The proper thing would have been to call up the usual security escort for Lalana, but Lorca decided there was no need. "Shall we?" They set off in the direction of the turbolift. "You know, we have a similar saying on Earth."

"Oh?" When Lorca explained it, Lalana almost fell over with mirth, her tongue clicking rapidly in amusement. "I suppose some truths are universal! Even if they are not applied in the same way."

Lorca snorted. "That's one way of putting it." He noticed Lalana's stride seemed less graceful than usual. Sluggish, even. "You all right?"

"Yesss," she replied, a trill on her tongue. "It was simply so much food. I do not think I will need to eat anything else for many days." It had looked like she had cleared roughly her own mass in food from the table.

"You and me both," he agreed, though in his case the sentiment was figurative rather than literal. "I hope you can still fit into the box tomorrow." The box in this instance referred to the cargo container that would house Morita's bow and hide Lalana and the transponder.

She clicked her tongue at him and spun her hands, picking up on the joke from his tone. She attempted to reciprocate. "I hope you can still fit into... nnh... your chair!"

It wasn't initially clear what chair she was referring to. "My... the captain's chair? On the bridge?"

"Yes!"

He sniffed lightly. "Joke's on you. I never sit in that thing."

"Yes, that is what everyone says," she said, clicking in laughter. He wondered who "everyone" was, exactly. Probably anyone who worked on the bridge or had eyes.

Lalana was wondering something herself: "Was that a 'hug' when Yoon put her arms around me?" Lorca indicated so. "This has been a day of many firsts, then. My first hug, my first dinner where I was invited to be at the table, my first human bugs—or rather, Earth bugs—my first _octopus_ , and my first music, and _dancing_."

He could hear it in the translation when she was using English words. She was picking up more and more of them despite her inability to say them properly. "I hope you're not too mad about the name thing."

"No, I have no anger for it, and if I did have anger, it is gone now," she said, apparently meaning what was done, was done. "I am only sorry I could not say 'Gabriel' better. I think Gabriel is the most difficult name I have encountered, especially in English."

She had just said it twice in succession. The translator made it seem easy. "If it's too hard to say, you don't have to say it any more."

She seemed to think a moment. "It is not hard for me to say your name when I speak lului, it is only difficult in English. Computer, disable lului to English translation." The computer beeped. Lorca stopped short, eyebrows knitting with suspicion. Leaning back on her tail for balance, Lalana said slowly and with surprising clarity, "Yur nem in lului ss 'Hayliel Lorla.'"

His expression softened. For a long moment he said nothing. A smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. He took a breath, said, "I love it," and snorted with amusement. Her hands spun. He repeated it: "Hayliel Lorla." Now he had an alien, and an alien version of his name to go with it.

"Lo-lu-la. Lelolalanluluilelalu 'lin-hle' lolalan." He recognized the patterns of the words "computer" and "English." The computer beeped again. "I am very glad you like it."

They resumed walking. "I still can't believe you're eight hundred years old. That's older than Starfleet."

"And yet, in eight hundred years, I have done far less than you. Perhaps that is why lului live so long. Because if we lived the same amount of time as you do, then we would never accomplish anything. Even as it is, most lului do nothing." An ensign appeared in the hallway. He stepped to the side and stood at attention as they passed. "Seeing the things humans and other species do in their short lives, I think I understand why it is we are considered animals, a different class of life."

"I don't think you're an animal," offered Lorca, intending it to be consolatory.

"Are not all living things animals? Even humans?"

Lorca squinted slightly. "Technically, yes, but—"

"But for some reasons, humans see themselves as apart from other animals. And many other intelligent species do, too. That is one facet of your species and the others that I do not think I will ever adopt. I do not think I am so far removed from what I eat."

"Some people couldn't eat meat if they thought it was too much like themselves," said Lorca. Lalana hummed slightly in reply. They lapsed into silence. Then he asked, "That stuff you said about Chen... Larsson?"

"You mean, did Einar tell it to me? Yes, he did. He said many things about Walter Chen when Walter Chen died. He told me Chen had brought his death upon himself by virtue of his own incompetence, and suggested that if he had gone instead of Chen, the only ones who would have died were the pirates. He also said Chen did not take his duties seriously enough. And that he was always 'sucking up' to Reiko, which does not mean like it sounds at all. It means Walter Chen liked Reiko very much and wanted her to like him."

"Thank god you didn't mention that," said Lorca. It sounded like Lalana had misinterpreted 'sucking up' as a compliment.

Lorca considered Larsson's commentary. So much for not speaking ill of the dead. The Swede had really torn into Chen. It would have been easy to interpret Larsson's criticisms as indicating he and Chen hated each other, but it would also have been wrong. As Lorca well knew from experience, some people responded to grief with anger.

It was interesting how Lalana had recontextualized Larsson's criticisms into compliments. She had repurposed her "thousand million" speech in a similar way. There was a sort of efficiency to it he liked.

He had gone silent long enough that Lalana inquired, "What are you thinking?"

Lorca pondered how to put it. "Larsson didn't have a lot of nice things to say."

Lalana clicked her tongue. "No, he is not a nice person in general."

Lorca winced. "Please tell me I didn't assign you another crewmember you hate."

"The opposite! Simply because Einar is not nice does not mean I do not like him. I like him very much. Thank you for letting him chronicle the history of the lului. He is an excellent choice, and I am sure he will provide benefit to your Starfleet archives."

Lorca smiled, relieved. "You're welcome. I'm just glad you didn't tell Reiko everything he said. "

Her tail flicked back and forth. "Of course not. Da Hee says Reiko blames herself for what happened, so I used Einar's words in a way that would make her feel better. And added some words of my own. Maybe it was not entirely true that Walter Chen did so many things for the delight of seeing people laugh and smile, but I delight in it, and I imagine Walter Chen might have done so, too, else why would he play so many effective jokes?"

Lorca paused a moment. "Practical jokes," he corrected. "So you made that whole part about laughs and smiles up?"

"Yes, did you like it?"

He crossed his arms and exhaled slowly through his nose. "It was a good lie," he admitted at last. A familiar nagging doubt had returned to the back of his mind.

"It was not a lie, it was simply a repurposed truth. Truth depends upon who is speaking and who is listening." _Fortune cookie_ , he thought. She continued, "You also repurpose truths. It is something you and I have in common. It is one reason why I enjoy watching you so much."

The nagging doubt exploded into a full-blown mental red alert. He stopped again, much more suddenly this time, his arms unclasping. His voice rose in warning. "Lalana. If I find out you've been lying to me—"

She clasped her hands together, recognizing his tone. "I have not forgotten what you said about telling you the truth and telling you everything so you can be effective as captain, even though I think that was an impossible request. I cannot tell you every truth there is because there is not enough time in your life for me to do so. There is not even enough time in my life, which is much longer than yours."

"Lalana—"

"Perhaps if you could liliann, but since humans cannot liliann, I understand that it is hard for you trust me. I see it as plainly as the fur on your head. I wish I could convince you to trust me as much as I trust you, because I do trust you—"

"Lalana."

"—with my life and the lives of my people. I know humans and lului are very different—the way you view death, the way you view truth, the way you misunderstand me when I am saying things—"

He gave up on stopping her.

"If it will give you peace, I will speak as many truths as I am able. I envy you humans, the way you live, the stars you explore, I would trade a hundred thousand million cycles on Luluan if it meant I could live as long as you do and were able to do half of the things you have done. I wish I could dance the way you can, but I am not tall enough. I wish I could make face expressions like you do, and pilot ships, and wear your uniforms, and kiss, and sing! Singing is the most amazing thing. If only lului voices could change the way human voices do. I am so glad I get to experience these things because I am here with you. Three times we have walked past turbolifts now, and I would be glad to walk past three more, not simply because it would make three into six, but because I would be pleased if we passed the turbolifts nine times, which is the most unfortunate number there is. Every time we pass the turbolift, it means we keep walking, and I love walking on this ship. I wish I could walk like this forever."

Despite her eight hundred years, much of her personality and mannerisms reminded him of a child, and it was hard to stay mad at her. "Are you done now?" he asked. She answered him with silence. Where even to start. "All right, come on." They resumed walking. After a few paces he said, "Sometimes I wonder if you're just telling me what I want to hear."

"If I am, it is only because you are my favorite human. I would watch you forever if only you lived that long."

He snorted with amusement. "I'll try not to die any time soon."

"Please don't!"

They passed the turbolifts seven more times before finally calling it a night.


	18. End of the Line

Everything was set, double- and triple-checked. The trap was ready. Lorca paced the bridge with more urgency than usual, buoyed by a rising level of adrenaline. Success was so close he could taste it. When he stopped in front of the viewscreen and looked at the stars, his expression was one of intense self-satisfaction. He knew what came next.

"Contact!" reported Carver.

Perfectly on schedule. "Set course to intercept."

A familiar ship appeared on the viewscreen. "Open a channel. Dartaran vessel, this is the USS Triton. Cut your engines and prepare to be taken into custody."

The ship did not immediately respond. Lorca could just picture the panic on the little transport right now. He bit his lip in glee.

"We will fire on you." He signaled the tactical officer, who powered up weapons. That got their attention. Two familiar faces appeared on the viewscreen. "Well isn't this a small universe."

Margeh and T'rond'n's mouths were hanging open in shock. "This—this is harassment!" screamed Margeh. "We are reporting you to the Dartaran authorities!"

"Then you can explain to them why I've got a warrant for your arrest."

"Oh what charges!" Margeh shrieked at a volume and timber that made T'rond'n visibly recoil.

Lorca remained perfectly calm, but her shriek had hurt even his much less sensitive ears. "Attempted murder."

It was the normally reticent T'rond'n who spoke next. "What! We haven't murdered anyone."

"Are you familiar with a man named Beldehen Venel?" He crossed his arms and let that name hang on the air a moment, long enough for the Dartarans to realize how utterly screwed they were. "After our last encounter, we investigated information we got from your 'thief.' Imagine our surprise when we found an illegal hunting operation out of Risa." Of course, the Dartarans had been the central point investigation, and most of the information had come after the thief's supposed death, but they didn't know that. "And on the list of upcoming clients, your names. Now, it seems to me, by this point, you knew the lului were an intelligent species, and yet. You still booked another hunt."

Neither Dartaran spoke. They seemed to be frozen with shock.

"Now, as part of our new agreement with the lului, we're going to take you into custody until they can decide whether or not to charge you. So engines and shields. Don't keep me waiting."

* * *

Margeh paced the conference room and muttered and hissed to herself. That damn Federation captain. Who did he think he was? A bully, that's what he was. Using a Federation warship to threaten a tiny civilian transport. Forcing them onto his ship like prisoners. And now he refused to even come and talk to them, leaving them alone in this miserable room without any contact with the outside world. Were they not entitled to legal representation?

Seated at the table, T'rond'n watched Margeh pace with concern. He felt wholly responsible for this ordeal. Perhaps if he hadn't been so sad about the lului being gone, Margeh would not have called up Venel to get another. Peter Bhandary hadn't helped things, either, though T'rond'n did not blame Peter. The human had only been trying to help. How could Peter have known the impact his words would have on Margeh?

The doors slid open. "Finally," hissed Margeh, stopping and grabbing the back of a chair.

The man who entered was not Captain Lorca. This man had dark skin. "Sorry to keep you waiting, I'm Commander Benford." He motioned for Margeh to take a seat, but she remained standing. "Captain Lorca was called away on an emergency. He sends his sincerest apologies." Benford's voice was positively dripping with saccharine concern, to the point of utter ridiculousness.

Margeh's ire was immediate. "What!"

"We'll do everything we can to make your stay a pleasant one until his return. For now, I can escort you to guest quarters."

"Absolutely not!" shouted Margeh, slamming her hands on the back of the chair. "I demand to speak to our government."

"Unfortunately, the nature of this emergency requires we keep a total communications blackout, but don't worry, we'll have this cleared up within a day or two. Three, four days at most. Certainly not more than five." Benford smiled in a way that suggested he was on the verge of hysterical laughter.

Margeh's hands gripped the chair so tightly her claws pierced the padding. She inhaled deeply. T'rond'n heard her do this and immediately covered his earholes.

"Where! Is! Your! _Captain!_ "

* * *

At that very moment, Lorca was sitting in the Dartarans' transport shuttle with his feet up on the console, staring at the stars going by and listening in as Lalana and Larsson continued the lului historical survey.

Originally, the plan had been for Carver to come along and stay with the ship, but Larsson had petitioned to take her place to get more time for his project (which was more extensive and thorough than Lorca had realized) and now Morita was piloting the craft so Larsson could do just that.

The poor Dartarans would never know how thoroughly they had been played. When they had transferred their funds for the trip to Venel yesterday morning, the Triton had intercepted the transfer, relabeled it as payment for Lorca and Morita, and sent Venel a brief written message: "Unable to attend. Mining emergency. Here are funds for Lopez. Remaining funds in dilithium on ship plus extra to upgrade Lopez trip and make up for our absence. Will be in contact to reschedule." The Dartarans never received Venel's condolences about the emergency, because the communication intercept made sure it went to the Triton instead.

From there, it had been easy to intercept the clueless Dartarans on their route from Tederek to the rendezvous point, commandeer their ship, and take their place. By this time tomorrow, they would be on Luluan.

For now, they drifted along through space at an abysmal pace in the Dartarans' barely warp-capable ship.

In the rear of the ship, Lalana was presently telling Larsson about a planetary gathering where the lului had settled a disagreement between two major competing philosophies about trees. While the details of the tree philosophies weren't terribly interesting (one group thought old trees should be eaten and knocked over to make room for new trees, the other felt new trees threatening the life of old trees should be eaten instead, and for the life of him Lorca couldn't decide why this necessitated a planetary conference to choose one or the other), it was notable how the lului functioned like a miniature Federation. The many disparate tribes, sects, and groups united into a single whole when need presented itself.

And yet, something about it unnerved Lorca. The way Lalana described these gatherings, it was as if the lului were all individuals until they got together for one of these chats, and then they became a hivemind that followed whatever the group decided.

All organizations were like this, of course, including Starfleet and the Federation. Once consensus was reached, members were expected to fall into line and comply with orders. It was a necessary part of unity. Leaders made decisions and subordinates followed.

Lorca accepted the necessity of obedience in general, but he had always felt he had the right and even sometimes the responsibility to question orders when they seemed incorrect, or to follow his own instincts in a pinch. The commanders above him weren't infallible. They didn't necessarily know what he knew, or see what he saw. Starfleet worked so well partly because the trust between commanders and subordinates went both ways. A good leader utilized the intelligence, experience, viewpoints, and perspective of the officers under him.

And the lului weren't a military. So far as he could tell, at no point in their history had they had a war until the foreigners landed and tried to build things on Luluan. The idea of a civilian population falling so easily and willingly into line with something they opposed was counter to human nature.

Not that lului were human.

Lorca glanced down at the console. Four hours to go. The Dartaran ship was agonizingly slow. He got up from the console and began to pace its length, which wasn't much.

After several minutes of this, a very gruff Swedish voice went, "Do you ever sit down, _sir_."

Lorca whirled on his heel and fixed Larsson with his most withering glare, but the Swede, who was about half a foot taller than Lorca and built rather like a leskos with broad shoulders and burly arms covered in blonde hair, was entirely unphased. Larsson didn't work on the bridge. He lived in the armory when he wasn't looking after the brig, and unlike most of the officers who interacted with Lorca on a daily basis, he was unaccustomed to having someone walk back and forth past him dozens of times. He felt the question entirely justified.

"Do you have more fortune cookies?" asked Lalana, effectively diffusing the situation.

He did, of course, and fetched her one. Rather than break it and eat as she usually did, she folded it into the broad end of her tail. When she opened her tail back up, she had removed the fortune from the cookie without breaking the shell. Her hands spun furiously in delight as she offered the paper part to Lorca. He took one look and groaned. It was bound to happen eventually.

"What? What is it?" She hopped down from her seat and grabbed hold of Lorca's arm for balance as she stretched up to see, as if her seeing meant anything when she could not read.

He sighed. "It's a joke," he said by way of warning. "A bad one."

"A joke?" Her hand tightened on his sleeve. "A fortune can be a joke? What is the joke!"

He snorted at her excitement and smiled. She was so earnest. "'I thought I'd never get out of that cookie.'"

"That is a terrible joke," said Lalana, amazed. "I love it!" Lorca laughed and gave her back the paper. Then he went and stood behind Morita, who was entirely fine with him being there.

"If you need to kill some time, you can read my book," offered Morita, not looking up from the controls.

"Is it a manual on phaser maintenance?"

Morita smiled. "Not then and not now." She handed him her personal padd, stripped of all its Starfleet data.

Lorca scanned a few paragraphs. "This..." It wasn't a manual on phaser maintenance protocols. The closest it got to anything even resembling a phaser was a vivid description of a gripped hand sliding across someone's back.

"Plenty other books there if you prefer."

"Ah, this'll do," said Lorca, and leaned back against the wall. After a few minutes he resumed pacing, but slowly, thoroughly engrossed by Morita's preference for reading material, and Larsson seemed not to mind. Lorca barely caught any of Lalana's continued description of lului history as the time slipped by.

"We're an hour out," Morita announced, handing the controls over to Larsson.

This was the part Lorca had been dreading. Morita grabbed the medkit while Lorca abandoned the padd and opened the crate containing Morita's yumi bow. He lifted up the foam padding. The transponder parts were sitting inside.

Back on the Triton, before they'd issued Lalana a communicatorm they had tried to implant her with a tracking device. It had seemed an obvious solution. Insert a tiny device under the skin and they would once and for all be able to keep tabs on her location, providing peace of mind to the entire security staff.

Ek'Ez had subsequently determined the signal obfuscation was a field generated on a cellular level, and that it affected anything within the external "fur" layers of her cells. "It stands to reason, captain," Ek'Ez had said, "as the cells are the basis of all things lului, that the cells are producing this effect." So they had given her a communicator instead and Lorca had gotten an idea.

An idea he now slightly regretted as he crouched on the floor looking at the transponder pieces in the bottom of the crate. They were as small and stripped down as they could be courtesy Arzo and Billlingsley's efforts, and Ek'Ez had tested the procedure with Lalana and proclaimed it a success, but it still seemed like an awful lot of parts. This wasn't a handful of staples he was asking her to swallow.

Nor was it entirely foolproof. An old-fashioned metal detector or magnetic scan would show the presence of the materials, and a deep sonic scan that penetrated the layer of foam lining the crate would reveal Lalana herself.

Lalana joined him at the crate, pressing her body against his arm and draping her tail across his shoulder. She gave his shoulder a squeeze. The lului version of a hug.

It took half an hour to get all the pieces inside her. They could have done it faster, but Lorca wanted to double-check none of the pieces got in the way of Lalana moving, in case something went wrong and she had to make a sudden escape. "It is fine," she assured them, repeatedly. Her muscular system was so different to a human's, some of the part placements didn't make sense, but they worked, and that was the important thing.

Thirty minutes out, they went over the emergency procedures yet again.

Fifteen minutes out, they double checked the crate to make sure it was secure.

Ten minutes out, Lalana tested out the space in the crate she would be hiding in, splaying her haunches in a way that made her skeletal structure look unhinged, and declared it fine, too.

Five minutes out, Lorca started to close the crate. "Remember. Three taps, we get you out."

"Two and two is all well," she replied, and he closed her up within the foam, then battened the latches on the crate. A moment later, there was a small double-tap from inside. She was not supposed to initiate the tap sequence herself, but it was fine for now. Lorca tapped his finger twice on the crate's lid in reply.

There she would stay, sealed in darkness, for far longer than any of them intended.

* * *

The Gentonian ship was a welcome sight not just because they were now one trip away from Luluan, but because the vessel in question was warp-8 capable. No more trudging along the cosmos at snail pace. The fact that the ship had been bought by the deaths of an untold number of lului did little to dampen Lorca's enthusiasm at the prospect of reaching Luluan before the day was out.

They docked with the vessel and were greeted by a Gentonian woman offering refreshment. The crew was predominantly Gentonian, but not exclusively. There was also an alien of a species Lorca didn't recognize that looked like a large green Saurian who handled the luggage.

The Gentonian in charge was a male named Egarell. He had the trademark speckled yellow skin of most Gentonians, but with shorter whiskers than his fellows, and a scattering of dark green freckles along his scalp. His whiskers shivered in anticipation as he accepted the crate of dilithium. It was an easy commodity to trade or resell, and virtually untraceable. Everyone loved dilithium.

Morita was brilliant when it came time for luggage inspection. "Careful with that!" she barked as the underling assigned to scan their cargo neared the bow crate. "This is a genuine Imperial bow crafted by the last master bowmaker on Earth." She opened the crate as if to show it off, but really she was displaying the fact the crate only contained a massive bow and a lot of foam padding. "You will not find one better." Seeing the interior, the Gentonian gave the crate a cursory check with his hand scanner, saw nothing else inside, and moved on. Once all the luggage was approved, Larsson took the Dartaran ship and few it away back the way it had come. According to the Gentonian's protocols, the voyage would be underway only once the Dartaran ship was out of sensor range.

Even Lorca, who liked to account for every possible eventuality when it came to security, thought this was being excessive.

"Allow us to show you to your stateroom," said Egarell.

Morita went to stand next to the bow crate. "This comes with us. I know it may not look like much to you, but this bow is one of a kind and I don't want it out of my sight."

Lorca stepped over and slid his hand around Morita's waist with an ease that hid the fact this was only the second time he had done this move with her, the first time having been at dinner. "I'm sure they'll be careful," he drawled.

"Like those porters were with my orchids last week? No."

Lorca shrugged as if to say, what can you do? "You heard my wife."

"Two men!" added Morita, and then personally oversaw them as they moved to the stateroom.

"My wife takes her archery very seriously," Lorca told Egarell.

Egarell had read that in the Risian files on his new clients. "She may find a weapon that primitive is not the most suited to hunting this prey," Egarell advised.

Lorca gave a short laugh. "Either she'll figure that out for herself, or she may surprise you. She surprises me all the time." He thought about the smut on Morita's padd and smirked to himself.

"A formidable woman," Egarell observed.

"The best kind."

The stateroom was modest in size, but decorated in elegant cool grey tones with slate accents. A plate of fresh fruit provided the room's only splash of color. The room was windowless, to Lorca's disappointment, though he'd expected as much. The bow crate had been placed along a wall beside their personal luggage. Morita was already reclining on a chaise lounge eating some grapes and reading. She had not been permitted to keep her padd, as while it did not possess the ability to transmit, it did have an internal clock. Instead, the Gentonian woman had transferred Morita's reading materials to a handheld reader the Gentonians provided.

"Please make yourself comfortable," said Egarell. "It will be several hours until we arrive at the hunting preserve. If you need anything, simply use the console by the door and someone will be happy to provide it."

Egarell departed. Lorca surveyed the fruit. There were fresh strawberries, which weren't cheap this far out in space. He ate one and moved towards Morita.

"Security monitor in the door console," she said quietly.

"Damn," said Lorca under his breath. It was unlikely they were going to be able to let Lalana out for any length of time while aboard the ship, but this meant they would have to actively avoid doing anything suspicious. "Do you want a shawl?"

"Sure."

He went to the luggage and started sifting through the clothes. As he did, he tapped the side of the bow crate twice. Tap-tap came the muffled answer. "It's gonna be a while," he said in a low voice, though Lalana probably couldn't hear him well if at all through all the foam padding.

As he brought the shawl back to Morita, he felt the telltale shift of the warp engines engaging. He would have given anything for a window to look out of. He never felt further from home than when there were no stars.

* * *

The ship went in and out of warp several times, executing some unknown array of course changes designed to obfuscate its trail. Every time it did, Lorca went to the luggage, switching out jackets, taking off his shoes, anything he could think of. Every time: tap-tap, tap-tap. "You should get some rest," Morita advised after a bit.

"Can't," he said tersely, and instead requested the Gentonians bring him coffee. They were distant but accommodating hosts.

Morita tried to nap, unable to do more than that with him pacing, and noted with dismay the level of agitation in Lorca when she returned to a state of full wakefulness. There were two sides to a man as active as Lorca, she thought. On the one, he was always up and raring to go. On the other, it was hard to get him to stop, especially when there wasn't a clock around to tell him it was time to.

"Come put your feet up," she said, in a tone that suggested it was as much as order as any he might have given as captain. As she worked her thumbs along the arch of his feet, he finally stopped fidgeting and closed his eyes.

She carefully slipped off the chaise lounge, draped the shawl over him, and went over to the luggage. She opened the crate and pretended to inspect the bow, shifting the foam as she did so there was a small gap of open air. "Stay still," she said, so quiet it would have been impossible to hear her even an arm's length away. "I finally got him to sleep, so no taps for a little while. Hopefully not much longer." She tapped the side of the crate twice. Lalana tapped twice back. Morita pushed the foam back down and took the bow out, practicing her form for a little while before putting it away. Then she went and closed her eyes, for real this time, on top of the bed provided.

Lorca awoke to the sound of the door chime. The ship was no longer in warp. "Enter," he said, sitting up and orienting himself. Gentonian ship, heading to Luluan, Morita—Lalana in the box against the wall. How long had he been out?

Egarell appeared. "We have arrived at the planet."

"Excellent," proclaimed Lorca.

"When you're ready, we'll land. You're welcome to join us on the bridge."

"Great. We'll just freshen up." He turned and saw Morita sitting up in the bed.

Egarell departed and Lorca immediately launched himself over to the luggage and tapped the crate while grabbing fresh clothes. Tap-tap came the response, and he exhaled. Morita came and stood beside him. She put a hand on his shoulder and tapped her finger twice, though whether she was offering assurance or making a small joke at his expense, he couldn't tell. "Let's go."

There was a Gentonian waiting to escort them to the bridge. The cruiser's bridge had half as many stations as the Triton, but boasted an impressive curved viewscreen that provided a vista of stars which Lorca immediately walked up to.

Lalana had mentioned the sky above Luluan was red, but also that its star was, and the presumption had been a reddish composition to the atmosphere. Now Lorca knew she had meant the planet was sitting in a region of space colored red by massive quantities of interstellar gases. Given the Starway offices on Risa, the rendezvous location, the fact that they certainly hadn't been traveling more than ten hours...

The Briar Patch. Luluan was in the Briar Patch.


	19. The Tip of the Spear

Luluan itself was a swirl of dark green and brown beneath sparse bands of clouds that revealed patches of ochre yellow as they descended in the supply shuttle. Egarell had given them the choice: transport down after the shuttle landed and base camp was set up, or fly down with the shuttle and enjoy a small tour of the planet's surface. Lorca had chosen the scenic route.

As they made their descent, Egarell took great pleasure in providing narration. "Welcome to the planet of the galaxy's most challenging prey, the lului." The way the Gentonians casually threw around the actual name of the species indicated that not only did they well and fully know the lului were intelligent, they did not care, and enjoyed flaunting it to their unsuspecting clients.

"We're headed for a site called Keltah, with pristine vistas of the vast forest that covers much of the planet. The humidity in the air is quite low, but the planet is not dry. Far from it. It has many subterranean sources of water. Purified by passage under the earth and infused with minerals, the water in the well at Keltah is some of the finest you will ever taste."

Luluan had no oceans, at least not on this side of the planet. The vast stretches of green were, as Egarell described, forest. A few dark specks in the ochre and brown areas turned out to be small lakes.

Lorca wished Lalana could have seen the descent to Luluan from space. There was something special about seeing your own homeworld rise up before you or vanish behind you, the familiar landmarks of your childhood suddenly rendered into the context of a planetary whole. Even if your homeworld was the most insignificant, unremarkable rock in all of existence, it still meant something different than all the other worlds you might visit. For better or worse.

"While the planet may not look like much, I assure you it is quite impressive from the ground. Ah, perhaps you can see what I mean now?"

As the shuttle circled towards the ground and shifted to a lower vantage point, the mass of dark green forest began to resolve itself into individual trees. Massive trees. Most were modest in height, but periodically one large tree jutted out from the surrounding forest, towering above the others, its trunk the size of a football field and dotted with comparatively short, squat branches, each branch as massive as a California redwood. They had to be incredibly old to grow so large. Their age was probably measured in tens or hundreds of lului cycles.

Suddenly, the importance of a planetary philosophical debate about tree preservation made sense. A question as to whether the lului should preserve these old trees or make way for new ones was really a discussion about historical building preservation. The buildings in this case just happened to be trees, and from the looks of it, the preservationists had won out.

Accompanying them on the shuttle were two non-Gentonian guides. One was the large, green not-a-Saurian Lorca had noticed earlier. Egarell introduced him as Zark. Zark did not say much, hissing in what Lorca assumed was a greeting, but he looked strong enough to rip a human in half.

The other guide was a tall, winnowy humanoid with brown skin and white circles around her eyes who carried a large spear and introduced herself, "I am Serot of the Shkef. I will kill a lului for you, if you have difficulty with the task and require it." Her garments were exceptionally minimal: a feathery-light material barely covering only those parts which modesty demanded.

"The lului aren't dangerous individually," Egarell explained when questioned about the need for the guides, "but can be formidable in groups. Rest assured, we have never lost a client, we are very proactive about safety."

 _Oh, I'm sure they could kill you individually if they felt like it_ , thought Lorca. The lului need only to drop their moral compunction about using lelulallen offensively as Lalana had done on Tederek and a single lului could be as efficient a killer as any of the deadlier species in the quadrant.

The ship came to a shuddering halt on the planet's surface in a sloping area slightly elevated above the forest floor. The sky was a pale purplish blue from inside the atmosphere and the planet's light was a dimmer than Earth, but only by a barely perceptible amount. The trees stretched out in a sea of dark green all the way to the horizon. He wondered how many lului they might be looking at right now without realizing it.

The loading door opened. Warm air flooded in, fresh but somehow heavy and thick, like molasses, with a heady scent of tree sap.

Egarell provided one final warning before they exited the shuttle. "The subterranean water features can make for unstable terrain, eroded by streams and rivers invisible to the naked eye. Always watch your step for pits and gullies, and be prepared for areas of quicksand. We will provide you with flotation devices and rebreathers in event of emergency, but please do not wander off unaccompanied. The best way to handle an emergency is to prevent it in the first place."

Morita took the opportunity to resume her steadfast vigil over the bow crate, directing the Gentonian crew to set up their tent so she could "relax before beginning the hunt." Really the goal was to get some privacy so Lalana could finally be let out. If Lorca had known how long she would be in there, he would have left her some fortune cookies or a light source or drilled in air holes, risks be damned.

Since there was no need for both of them to stand watch over the crate, Lorca distracted himself by engaging Serot in conversation. "Serot of the Shkef, was it?"

"Yes," said Serot deferentially.

"Haven't met your people before."

Serot waved her head back and forth in a motion that set her whole body undulating downward. "We are not many, and we do not travel often. Unlike you humans. You are numerous, and travel to all the worlds you can. That is why we call you 'Tilka,' the Many-Travelers."

"Oh?"

"All words in our language are comprised of their true meaning. Shkef means 'wind-guide.' Serot means 'kill-stick.'" She tapped the end of her spear against the ground.

Egarell had suggested Morita's "primitive" weapon would not suffice for lului hunting, yet here was his self-proclaimed number one lului killer brandishing a weapon even more primitive than Morita's. "Can I see?"

"Certainly." Serot handed him her spear.

It weighed next to nothing. A slight breeze could have carried it away. He took one look at the blade and decided it looked sharp enough to slice his finger off. "Is this... aerogel?"

"Close," said Serot. "It is microlattice composite. Much stronger. With a blade edged with molecular precision." So much for primitive weaponry. This was probably the most advanced spear in the quadrant. He returned it.

"And you've killed a lot of lului?"

"Ninety strikes. The precise placement of a blade is necessary to prevent prolonged suffering."

"Impressive." When Serot said she would kill a lului for them, she had meant put it out of its misery if they happened to sloppily fail to do more than savagely wound it. A mercy killing. Probably also regular, straight-up killing if they couldn't even wound one on their own. Fantastic.

"They are quite an impressive species," continued Serot. "Most people believe they are a challenging opponent because they are fast, they change their color, they hide well, and you cannot scan them. But do you know what makes an opponent truly dangerous? Intelligence. The hardest things to kill are the smartest."

"How smart are they?" asked Lorca, testing her.

"Smart enough to satisfy whatever challenge it is you seek here. And if they wish it to be impossible, then it will be impossible."

"If they wish it? They're prey. We're hunters. We choose if they live or die."

"It is your will that kills them, not mine. I am merely here to fulfill your will."

The tent was up. Lorca excused himself on that cryptic note and went to watch the tail end of Morita's crate monitoring enterprise. All the Gentonians clearly thought she was completely insane raving nonstop about a strip of wood in a box, but let them. The important thing was they got the crate inside the tent. Morita chased off the merchants and sealed the tent flap for privacy. Lorca almost ripped the lid off and tossed the top layer of foam and the bow against the bed.

"Careful!" warned Morita. The tent was durable, weatherproof, and soundproof to an extent, but if they started making too much noise, it was going to force them to really expand the parameters of their cover personas to cover up the reason.

Lorca barely registered Morita's objection. Lalana was laying facedown, her fur completely limp. "Lalana?" He reached in and put a hand on her back. She felt cool to the touch. Like a corpse. Of course, she always felt that way.

A breeze stirred her fur. Except it wasn't a breeze, they were inside. She stirred. Lorca let out a sigh of relief.

She was alive, but all was not well. "Please... out now..."

The medkit was in their luggage. Morita grabbed the laser scalpel and gasped faintly as Lalana's flesh almost fell away from the transponder components with barely a touch.

"Lalana, tell us what to do," said Lorca, leaning his head inside so he could hear her. "Warm? You want it warmer?"

The planet was already warm and the tent's thermal regulator was set to cool the interior. Lorca immediately switched it to heat instead. Morita counted the pieces she had removed so far. Seven components of nine. She tried to remember where the last two were. "Neck," she recalled, feeling for the metal pieces under the skin. One was where it was supposed to be. The other seemed to have shifted.

"Well?" demanded Lorca, not helping.

"It moved," said Morita, feeling around. She found it over by what passed for a lului shoulder blade and moved in for the final slice. The slice went deep before the scalpel found metal. Morita stuck her fingers inside and felt around for an edge she could grab hold of. "Got it."

There was no blood, no ichor, no mess. The components all looked completely undamaged. Lalana, on the other hand, resembled a crumpled pile of flesh, as if someone had sloughed off their skin like a jacket and left it laying on the floor. Lorca reached in and managed to get his arms around her. It felt faintly horrific, like her skeleton had internally disconnected. It might well have. He carried her over to the thermal regulator and held her up in front of the vent. Her tail hung down like a piece of rope.

He kept his voice as calm and controlled as he could. "I thought you were checking on her."

Morita took a slow breath. "By the time she wasn't responding, there was nothing either of us could have done. It was during the shuttle flight down. I got her out as soon as I could without jeopardizing the mission."

Lorca said nothing. He stood, staring at the regulator, his hands shaking in fury. Morita wisely left him there and went to the other side of the tent to begin reassembling the transponder.

Ten minutes he stood there while Morita got the transponder up and running. Sweat dripped down his forehead as the tent heated up. He was miserably overdressed. He began to wonder if Lalana had been saying it was too warm, that she needed it colder, but then he felt a faint wriggle of tendrils under his hand and at his neck.

Her filaments fused into his skin. He swallowed in alarm, not sure what to do. It didn't hurt, but he instinctively knew if he tried to put her down now, it would rip the flesh from his hand and throat.

 _Lelulallen_. This was it, firsthand.

She wasn't intentionally trying to hurt him. Lelulallen was intended for healing, not harm. "Reiko," he whispered. Morita came in an instant, holding a glass of water to provide relief from the heat. Five minutes ago, that would have been just what the doctor ordered. Now it was a solution to the wrong problem. Morita's eyes went wide when she saw what had happened. "Listen to me very carefully. Tell them I'm taking a nap and take that crazy spearwoman into the forest and get her to catch you a live lului. Wound one if you have to. Just bring it back here."

Morita didn't hesitate or question the order. "Yes, sir." She grabbed her bow and was gone.

He elbowed the regulator to a lower setting, since he was liable to give himself heat exhaustion at this rate, and sat down on the bed very carefully as her fur pulled at his neck. "Lalana. You have to let go of me. Do you hear me? Let go."

There was no answer.

* * *

The moment they were out of sight of the campsite, Morita turned to Serot and said, "Find me a lului. A live one. Right now."

"Certainly," said Serot. "This way." They began to walk. The forest was eerily quiet. No insect chirps or birdsong. Occasionally something would rustle in the trees unseen, or a soft hum would rise from somewhere in the distance.

After five minutes, Morita said, "We must have passed one by now."

"Oh, they are very rare creatures, exceedingly hard to find," said Serot.

That, Morita knew, was the company line. She didn't have time for it. "There are millions of them. I just need to know where they are." She scanned the trees with her eyes, but saw nothing. "They're around us, aren't they? Watching?"

Serot leaned against her spear and considered the human. "You are jumping at shadows," she suggested.

"I'm not," said Morita. "Whatever they're paying you, I'll double it if you go fetch me a live lului right now."

Serot moved her head in a circular motion, then sat down on the ground, folding her legs and placing her spear on her lap. She closed her eyes.

"Triple it," said Morita, lying through her teeth.

"Sit down," said Serot. "You cannot force a lului to come any more than you can put the wind into a box. But if you sit, they may surprise you. Do not open your eyes until I say to."

Morita decided something was amiss, and somehow the captain knew about it. Why else would he have specified going into the forest with this strange woman? She folded her legs as Serot had and sat facing her on the ground.

Morita waited patiently. She heard movement around her but kept her eyes closed as instructed. Then all was quiet. The minutes ticked by. Morita opened one eye.

Serot was gone. Morita was alone in the forest.


	20. Gorn with the Wind

Morita called for Serot. This was not an occasion for panic—they were less than ten minutes out of camp and Morita was confident she could find her way back—but she wondered what Serot was playing at, leaving her alone in a forest supposedly riddled with deadly dangers, if Egarell's dire warnings were to be believed. The only sign of the alien guide was her cobweb-like garments hanging from a nearby branch. Morita ran her fingers across them curiously. It felt like cotton batting, not at all smooth to the touch, and seemed to be slightly tacky with adhesive. Bizarre.

Then she realized she had been given a real opportunity. The merchants would never have let her leave the camp alone and unaccompanied, but alone and unaccompanied might be her best shot at getting help.

She grabbed the translator on her hip and set it to lului, which had been labeled in the device as "Vulcan" in case anyone thought to check. (The captain's meticulous foresight had gone far above and beyond the merchants' paranoia about their guests. This was both impressive and also vaguely worrisome, because what level of paranoid did a person have to be to out-think these Gentonians?)

"Is there anyone there?" she said into the translator, broadcasting the message in lului. "My name is Lieutenant Commander Reiko Morita, of the Federation starship USS Triton. We mean you no harm. We were sent here by a member of your species named Lalana."

She waited. No response. She tried again. "We aren't with the merchants who have been hunting you. We came here to stop them. If anyone can hear me, please. My friend needs urgent medical attention."

A trilling noise sounded above. Morita looked up hopefully.

Something brown and dark green came hurtling down from above and landed on the ground next to Morita. She jumped back in surprise.

It was a lului.

There was a spear sticking out of its right leg. It flopped around on the ground, kicking its one good leg uselessly, and trilled in alarm, struggling to get away. It shifted from brown and green to a grey-brown color matching the color of the ground. Its eyes were green like Lalana's.

A shadow passed overhead and Morita looked back up. Serot descended from the treetops on a membrane of leathery red-brown skin stretched so thin between her wrists and ankles it seemed to glow in the sunlight and Morita could see the larger blood vessels and veins running through it.

"That was very clever!" said Serot, landing next to her spear and pressing it down into the ground so the trilling lului was pinned in place. "It was so distracted by the sounds you were making it did not notice me swoop in from behind. But I told you to keep your eyes closed! It's rude to look at someone while they're naked."

Morita gaped, unable to form sufficient words in reply.

"Now, I suppose you want to stick it with your arrow? It's not very sporting, but it is your hunt. As you will it."

The translator was still running. The lului was hearing every word of this.

"No!" said Morita, horrified. "Get off it!" She rushed forward, translator in hand, and pulled the spear out of its leg. "I'm not here to hurt you! I need your help!"

The lului finally ceased trilling in alarm and responded. "Why would I help you, off-worlder!"

"It speaks!" said Serot in surprise, retrieving her spear from where Morita had thrown it and collecting her garments. The lului also seemed confused, never having encountered a translator before.

Morita ignored Serot for the moment. "Not me, my friend, Lalana. She's a lului, she's hurt."

The green and brown lului suddenly stuck out its tongue and twisted it into the shape of a coil. Morita had never seen Lalana do this and did not know what it could possibly mean. "I'm Reiko. What's your name?"

The lului had to retract its tongue to answer. "I am Lualel."

"Lualel. I swear we'll let you go back to your people. I just need you to come with me."

Lualel seemed unconvinced, but Serot was standing with her spear in hand. "If that's what you want to do," said Serot. "So be it."

Morita realized that the reason Lorca had suggested she bring Serot was that Serot was willing to follow whatever a client commanded, to the letter.

There was no way Lualel was going to make it to the campsite on his own. The spear had gone all the way through his leg, severing the matrix completely and exposing bone. At least he seemed not to be in any pain. He was more annoyed than anything—doubly so when Morita insisted on hefting him onto her back to carry him. Despite his protests, he pinched his hands onto her shoulders to avoid falling off. They set off back towards camp, Serot carrying both spear and bow.

When they got close, Morita issued a new command to Serot. "I need you to go into camp, get everyone's attention, and tell them I wandered off. Tell them... Tell them you want to find me before my husband wakes up. Get as many of them as you can to go into the woods."

"As you will it," said Serot, breaking off to do just that.

Morita waited at the camp's edge. Serot appeared on the far side of the encampment, making a great show of attracting attention. Morita scanned the area, found the coast to be clear, and dashed towards the tent while everyone was distracted.

Lorca was laying on the bed, Lalana on his chest, his hands still stuck wrapped around her and his head propped up awkwardly against a pillow. "Finally!" he rasped hoarsely.

"What has Lalana done now," said Lualel.

"You know her?" said Morita.

"Of course. We are only seven merges removed from the last cycle Lalana took part in. Even if it were a hundred merges..."

Morita deposited Lualel onto the bed next to Lalana and Lorca. "Can you fix this?"

Lualel ran his tongue across Lorca's arm and along the back of his hand. Lorca made a disgusted face. "It is not broken," said Lualel.

"She's stuck to me!" hissed Lorca. His voice was a hoarse whisper out of necessity.

"Yes, well, that is the point of a healing merge. To provide a living support structure to reform the cellular pattern. If you had given more surface area this would not be going so slowly."

It dawned on Lorca what Lualel was suggesting. The problem wasn't that he was human. The problem was that he had his shirt on. The situation might have been funny had it not been so incredibly dire. His neck was killing him and his lului seemed like she was dying. Neither thing inclined him to laughter.

Still. "The things women will do to get my shirt off," he quipped.

Morita stared at him hopelessly. He really couldn't help himself, could he? It the Triton were caught in the gravity well of a black hole and about to be torn to atomic shreds, he would probably be joking about it, suggesting at the very least they were about to get a hole in one. "Can you get her off him?" she asked Lualel.

"Yes," said Lualel, tail dropping down on top of Lalana's barely-moving form. Lualel's tail began to vibrate.

Lorca gave a strained yell and twisted away from Lualel as a wave of pain shot through him. "Stop!" He sucked air in through his teeth. The pain went away as suddenly as it had come.

A single word escaped from Lalana, so soft the translator barely picked it up. "Killing."

Lorca winced and returned to his original position, relieving the strain on his neck and hands. "Are you trying to kill her!?" he exclaimed.

"Not as you understand it, no. I am attempting to absorb her mass into my own."

That sounded an awful lot to Lorca like Lualel was trying to _eat_ her. "Don't," he said. " _Fix_ her." Lualel hesitated. Lorca decided to make his stance completely and abundantly clear to the lului. "She lives, you live. She dies, or in any way fails to get up and tell me exactly how wonderful everything is, you die."

Lualel's head turned and looked at Morita with what she could only imagine was a sense of disgust at filthy-offworlders and their lies.

Morita wasn't going to murder Lualel, no matter what Lorca ordered, but neither would she undermine her captain's threat. "You heard the man."

"Fine," said Lualel. "I will separate them."

It took some effort, but Lualel's tail worked its way between Lalana's filaments and Lorca's skin, freeing first a hand, then Lorca's head, and finally the remaining hand. Lorca rolled Lalana onto the bed, careful not to let any more exposed skin come into contact with her for more than a moment.

She was still a crumpled heap. Lualel poked her with his tail.

"Stop that," said Lorca, rubbing at the stiffness in his neck. His hands were still raw and red, and he guessed his neck looked much the same.

"How did this even happen," wondered Lualel aloud.

"Does it matter?" said Lorca before Morita could explain the circumstances. "Lelulallen her."

"Lelu... You would need three lului to do this."

"So go get me three lului," demanded Lorca.

"And let you capture them too?" retorted Lualel.

"You aren't a captive," said Morita. "You can leave any time you wish."

"Did you not say you would kill me if I could not make Lalana get up?"

Morita frowned at Lorca and crossed her arms. "The captain was just mad. We came here to help your people, not kill you. Captain?"

Lorca was not looking at either of them. He was entirely focused on Lalana's unmoving form. "What happens if we can't get three lului," he said flatly.

"What do you mean?" said Lualel.

"Is..." Lorca swallowed. "How long does she have?"

"What do you mean?" said Lualel again.

Morita came to the rescue. "How long does she have to live? Days? Hours?"

"Lalana is alive," said Lualel.

Lorca pressed his fingers to his temples, decided he really was going to kill Kerrigan for whatever deficiency in the translation matrix was subjecting them to this torture, and took a deep breath, preparing to unleash a torrent of fury into the tent.

Again Morita jumped in. "Lualel. We are asking you as nicely as we know how to tell us how long we have until our friend dies."

"Are you planning to eat Lalana?"

Lorca's mouth pulled into a snarl, revealing clenched teeth, and his hands finally formed the fists they had been threatening to since they were freed.

"No, of course not," said Morita quickly, watching Lorca intently and doing everything she could to avoid the brewing explosion.

Morita should have said the opposite, that they were planning to eat her, because Lualel's follow-up was: "Then why do you care when Lalana dies?"

It would have been easy to turn around, pick up one of the pieces of luggage, and throw it across the length of the tent to express his rage. Instead, Lorca closed his eyes, took another deep breath, and said coldly, "Get out."

"Cap—"

"Get out," he said again, followed by, "Get. Out."

Morita did not need to be told a fourth time. She grabbed hold of Lualel and dragged him outside, regardless of whether or not that was safe, because the one thing that was clear was that it was not safe for them to stay.

Lorca's chest and shoulders shook as he inhaled and exhaled, his face tense and flushed, but with each shuddering breath the urge to explode lessened, until his breaths were not shaky at all. "Three lului," he said, barely a breath. He just had to find her three lului.

He pulled the corners of the bedspread out and folded them around Lalana, forming a makeshift nest around her, then got his arms underneath it and hefted her up. Crouching down, he managed to get hold of the transponder with one hand.

Morita and Lualel were waiting outside, both looking wary and tense, waiting for the Gentonians to catch them exposed in the middle of camp. "Go," said Lorca to them. Morita crouched down, hefted Lualel back onto her back without complaint this time, and they took off into the forest.

"Tell me where to find the rest of your people," Lorca said as they went.

"I won't betray them to you," said Lualel.

"Lualel, listen to me. I'm sorry I threatened you. But we need your help to put an end to the hunting."

"Why do you care? You are humans."

"Look, humans aren't like lului. We aren't all one organization that follows the same rules. We don't have a planetary conference where we decide what to think about trees for the next two hundred years like you do!" He was getting fired up again. He stopped himself and dialed it back. "I'm just trying to help Lalana. Please."

"Why?"

"Because she asked me to help your people!"

His pace slowed. Had she ever asked, really? He had offered, and she had accepted, which was hardly the same thing.

He stopped. "Because this is my fault."

Morita turned and looked at him, reading the tenseness in his jaw and the trace of despair in his eyes.

"I was being clever and I put her in that box. I did this to her. And maybe I don't give a damn what happens to you and your people at this point, but Lalana does."

A twig snapped. Lorca and Morita turned and looked behind them, half-expecting to find themselves surrounded by lului who had secretly been listening in from the trees and had come to offer their aid.

There were no lului in sight. The hulking mass of green behind them was unmistakably Zark. The big green lizardman did not look moved by Lorca's speech. He looked murderous. His silvery flecked eyes seemed to take in every detail around him at once with an efficiency the humans could not.

He lifted one clawed hand and pointed it at Lorca. "Give," he growled.

Lorca realized the Gorn wasn't pointing to Lalana, but the transponder. His hand tightened around it. Morita started to try and shake Lualel off her shoulders, but being unable to walk, Lualel resisted this and clung to her more tightly. Lualel's eight fingers dug into the base of her neck with such force she began to feel lightheaded and had to reach out and steady herself against the nearest tree.

Lorca took a step backward. "Hold on just a minute here," he said, immediately switching to a charm offensive out of sheer necessity. "Let's talk."

" _Now_ ," said Zark, stepping forward.

"Split," said Lorca suddenly.

He turned and ran left and Morita did the same, heading off to the right.

Zark went in pursuit of Lorca. Lorca didn't look back, couldn't even hear Zark over the pounding of his own feet and the sound of his own breath in his ears, but he didn't have to. He knew Zark was there.

The heavy crack of a branch told him Zark was getting close. As fast as he was, he was carrying Lalana and Zark was bigger, faster, and stronger. He doubted the giant lizardman was even breaking his species' equivalent of a sweat. Lorca needed an advantage and he wasn't going to find one physically.

He was curving back to the right at this point, towards where he knew Morita had gone, and knew Morita would be curving left to meet him. With any luck, she had managed to ditch Lualel in the process. He just needed to get the transponder to her. Then the Triton would find them and everything would be fine.

He leapt over a fallen tree trunk covered in mottled brown moss, landed on the mossy ground on the other side without breaking stride, and the moss-covered ground gave way beneath his foot. Lorca pitched forward face first into a hidden reservoir of water, Lalana clutched against his chest. The transponder slipped from his fingers into the depths.

He immediately righted himself, sputtering for air in the open space created by his fall and kicking his legs in an attempt to keep Lalana above the surface of the water.

Zark stopped on the other side of the log, apparently wise to the fact moss-covered areas indicated water near the surface, and turned his head back and forth, looking for the transponder. Lorca was faced with a choice.

Brown moss continued off in two directions, indicating the water did, too, at a depth comparable to what Lorca had broken through. If he dove down, he would be able to retrieve the transponder and potentially elude Zark by resurfacing somewhere the lizardman did not expect.

But he could not do this while he was holding Lalana. If he wanted to retrieve the transponder, he was going to have to let her go.

He kicked up, took a deep breath of air, let go of the bundle containing Lalana, and dove down into the water.

The water was about three meters deep and stagnant. A column of light filtered down from where he had broken through the earth, illuminating clumps of moss and roots drifting suspended in the green-brown water around him. Clouds of dirt and debris swirled with his every stroke.

He spotted the transponder's faintly pulsing blue light. Though it was still operational (the fact the pieces had been designed to go inside Lalana must have helped), there was no guarantee it would remain that way for long. Formerly covered elements had been exposed during assembly and prolonged exposure to water could damage the device in any number of ways. Lorca swam for it with long, powerful strokes. The bedspread settled slowly downward in his wake, unfolding like a piece of origami in reverse as it drifted out of the column of light and into the shadows.

His hand closed around the transponder and he looked around for a point of egress. He picked a spot he guessed to be as far from Zark as possible and swam for it.

The ground gave way even more easily from below than it had from above. He emerged, gasping for air, beneath a veil of brown moss that clung to him like a net. He powered through the moss to the nearest solid ground as Zark circled towards him.

The lizardman was closer than Lorca had anticipated. Lorca scrambled out of the pond and stumbled to his feet, but not fast enough. Zark charged, doubling in speed, and struck Lorca in the shoulder, knocking him to the ground. Lorca curled around the transponder protectively and tried to crawl away.

Zark reached down, grabbed Lorca by the arm and leg, and tossed him through the air. He landed in the underbrush a good three and a half meters away. The transponder broke and the blue light went out.

Zark advanced on Lorca.

Lalana was gone. The transponder was broken. It seemed his time was up. Lorca struggled to sit, smirked at the oncoming lizardman, and said, "So much for little green men."

There was a whistle from above. Zark paused and turned his gaze skyward. Wheezing, Lorca did not manage even that.

Something came hurtling down from the sky like a bullet and landed sticking out of the ground next to Lorca. Zark had just enough time to register what it was before Lorca's hands closed around it and he felt a surge of adrenaline. He rose to his feet and charged Zark with a cry of desperate determination, the lizardman reciprocating with a furious roar.

The molecularly-edged tip of the spear sliced through Zark's skin without the faintest hint of resistance until it hit the back of Zark's rib cage, its point piercing through the skin on the other side near Zark's spine. Zark swung his claws at Lorca but Lorca leaned back just in time, pulling on the spear as he did. It came free as easily as it had gone in, cutting an even wider swathe of internal damage as Zark twisted around.

The single stab was not enough to finish Zark on the spot, but it did stagger him back, his claws tensing with alarm as rivulets of red blood poured down his torso.

Lorca did not wait. He spun the spear and sliced open Zark's throat. Zark fell, his silver-flecked eyes looking skyward at the true instrument of his death.

Serot drifted down and landed beside Lorca, folding up her membranes. She was naked as before, but Lorca took absolutely no notice of her and dropped her spear unceremoniously, dashing back to the stagnant pool.

He dove in the spot where he had emerged, powering towards the column of light and ignoring the spasms of pain in his hip, arms, and shoulders. He felt around in the darkness for the bedspread. His fingers brushed it. He pulled it towards him.

It was empty. Panicked, he ran his hands through the dirt around it, feeling for the familiar brush of her fur or the gelatin bounce of her flesh. He found only roots and bits of stone. He screamed into the water and kicked back to the surface.

His head bobbed into the air for only a moment, long enough for him to hear Morita's voice in the distance calling to him, but not long enough to register anything more as he dove back down.

Where was she. Where was she? He ran his arms across the bottom of the pond.

He had not taken enough of a breath. His chest spasmed as his body tried to breathe and he swallowed a mouthful of the dirty water. He was barely able to keep afloat when he resurfaced.

There was no sign of Lalana anywhere. She was gone.


	21. Tree's Company

_A/N: I'm sorry for the puns! (Except I'm totally not. Come on, how amazing was the Gorn one?)_

* * *

Morita pulled Lorca free from the pond and dragged him away from the water, which was no easy feat given that he weighed about fifty pounds more than her and was soaking wet. She let him cough up water and checked his pulse. Serot stood nearby on top of the moss as if it were perfectly solid and rinsed the blood from her spear.

"Gone," he coughed. "Lalana."

"In the water?" said Morita, looking back at the field of moss and the gaping holes in the surface. She pressed her hand onto Lorca's shoulder in reassurance. "I'll get her."

"No!" Lorca pulled himself upright, water dripping down his nose. "She was – in there – now—" He shook his head. "I don't know what happened."

Serot strode across the moss towards them. "I saved your life. I believe you owe me an explanation."

"The transponder," said Lorca, ignoring the request. He stumbled to his feet and set off in the direction Zark had thrown him, Morita and Serot following.

The big green corpse was still there, its silver eyes staring lifelessly skyward. Morita carefully took in the sight of the wide, red stain of blood across the ground.

Lorca picked up the transponder. The chassis was bent to almost a 130-degree angle. He handed it to Morita for inspection. "I don't think I can fix it," she said after a minute. "Do you think the Triton got the signal?"

"We're in the Briar Patch," drawled Lorca. "I wouldn't count on it."

Serot pointed her spear back in the direction of the pond. "Look!"

Something was rising from the water. It shook off the brown moss with a familiar vibrating motion, revealing a coat of purest white beneath. Giant green eyes stared at them. For a moment, Lorca's breath caught in his throat, but something told him that was not Lalana. Serot let out a small cry of alarm and drew Lorca's attention back to the clearing. The Shkef was looking up this time.

The trees around them were alive with movement. Bark slid and shifted, branches bent, and shapes emerged from the camouflage. Colors shifted from natural tones and textures to the bizarre. Bright crimson, orange, yellow, lime green with stripes of black, pale gold. The translator came alive with dozens of overlapping whispers, snippets of words and phrases emerging from the many voices:

"Unusual – water – the merciful one – human scum – looks like – not going—"

The white lului from the pond was still approaching, its strides long and graceful, torso swinging back and forth as its tail waved in sync. "Be wary," it said, "the merciful one is not to be trusted." It came to a stop a few meters away and sat back on its haunches, regarding them.

Lorca raised a hand slowly in greeting. "I'm Captain Lorca, of the—"

As the translator put this into lului, the response from the trees was immediate. All the myriad shades vanished in the blink of an eye and suddenly the clearing seemed totally abandoned. It was possibly to make out shapes, if you knew exactly where to look, but hard to tell where those shapes began and ended.

The only lului who did not react was the white one. "I know who you are," it said. "Lalana provided much information about you. It is not a threat, lului."

The shades of color returned. Most of the lului had not moved very far, they had simply matched themselves well enough to appear as branches, leaves, and bark.

Lorca's eyes widened. "Then, she's—"

"In my pond," said the white lului.

"She didn't drown?" Relief flooded his face.

"Drown?" repeated the while lului, as if not understanding. It was not that the translator had failed them. Kerrigan and Lalana had perfectly translated the term, as they had every term and phrase needed, no matter how alien to the lului. It was simply that some lului were more willfully obstinate about foreign concepts than others. "How can a lului die in water? What a strange thought."

The bright orange lului who had ventured further down than the others said, "Air-breathers. Air-breathers drown in water."

"Breathing," said a lului with purple fur perched in a high branch, "is such a strangely inefficient method of respiration. All species should use their skin. This willful obstinance..."

All the lului suddenly seemed to start talking at once, their voices overlapping one another, and the translator produced nonsense until the white lului's voice gradually rose from the din and the others fell silent one by one.

"...generations of star-travelers, that we may endure in the manner which we have chosen and return to more pristine days." A ripple passed across the white lului's surface from head to tail.

"But they are with the merciful one," said a brown lului the color of mud.

Lorca realized the merciful one didn't refer to him, flattering as that would have been, it referred to Serot. "Serot won't hurt you," he informed them, glancing at her and finally registering the full breadth of her unclothed form. She had the same sort of slender athleticism as Billingsley. "Will you?"

"I only kill, I do not hurt," said Serot, as if this were a point of pride. Morita looked confused. She had seen Serot spear and drop Lualel from several hundred feet up.

"Serot can't hurt us," said the orange lului, and finally hopped down to the ground so it was standing not far from Lorca. Its tongue clicked in amusement.

"When will your ship arrive?" asked the white lului. "You will take the hunters with you? All of the hunters? How will you prevent more from coming? There are many hunters."

Lorca thought about how to break the news to the lului that the transponder was broken and he had no way of knowing if, in fact, the Triton was coming at all, but then another plan surfaced in his mind. "About that..."

The lului heard him out, to their credit, but when he was done proposing what amounted to a massive battle to overwhelm the merchants and steal their ship, the orange lului smacked its tail against the ground and said, "Absolutely not!" The other lului smacked their tails as well. "As if we would ever do that, or even touch filthy weapons to give to you."

"I don't know what to tell you," said Lorca. "Transponder's broken. We don't know if our ship can even find us."

From high up, the purple lului called out, "Umale!" The other lului began to chorus it in response. "Umale! Umale!"

"Umale," said the orange lului.

"Umale," said the white one, and the chorus died down.

"What does that mean?" asked Lorca.

Now it was his turn to be ignored. "We will stay around you, so the hunters cannot find you on their scanners." Apparently they understood the mechanism that kept them hidden from scanners well enough to know that if they encircled the humans and the Shkef, it would provide the same effect over the area.

Lorca tried a different question. "What about Lalana?"

"What about Lalana?"

"We want to see her," said Morita.

"Linali, come and assist me merge-heal with Lalana," said the white lului to the orange one. "And you, Lelala." The bright green lului with the black stripes hopped down. Three lului. Finally. They departed for the pond.

"What now?" asked Morita.

"I guess we wait," sighed Lorca, using a tree to help himself down to the ground with a grimace. Everything hurt. He hadn't just gone all-out killing Zark and trying to find Lalana in the pond. He'd completely overdone it. Morita crouched down next to him and Serot took up a position in front of them, folding her legs into a pretzel. Lorca raised an eyebrow and smirked in appreciation.

"I knew you two were not married," said Serot.

Morita elbowed the captain, which only widened the grin on his face, and said, "How could you tell?" She thought they'd done an excellent job at the charade. There wasn't anything in her mind they had said or done that would have tipped anyone off.

"Your scents don't match. On your clothing. Married people have the same scent on their clothes. You clearly don't live together."

Lorca smacked his lips. "Didn't think of that one."

"Unbelievable," said Morita, shaking her head.

* * *

The lului in the trees around them ignored them entirely, preferring to keep their own company. Lorca noticed how they tended to sit together in groups of two or three, pressing up against one another, their filaments mingled together. Physical contact seemed to be an important part of their social interaction. Helped explain why Lalana sometimes seemed to get so "handsy" with her tail.

He could feel stiffness setting into his joints and lifted up his shirt to admire the spread of purpling skin across his side. It looked he could expect a bruise like no other. Amazingly, none of his bones had broken, but he had torn some of the cartilage along his ribcage and every breath was excruciating now that the adrenaline had worn off.

"Captain." Morita scrambled to her feet. Lorca looked over at the pond. Shapes were emerging: orange, white, green, and a familiar blue-grey color. He gasped and tried to get to his feet despite the pain, but only managed to get one knee up.

"Gabriel!" She would have run, if she could, but apparently she was still wobbly, leaning on Linali for support. She half-dragged Linali forward until she was close enough to hop the remaining distance and almost threw herself against his chest. He bit his teeth through the pain and wrapped his arms around her. Linali and the white lului sat and watched them. The green lului, Lelala, returned to the lului in the trees.

Lorca pressed his cheek against the top of her head. "I thought you were dead!"

"I am so sorry, Gabriel. I did not mean to lelulallen and cause you this much trouble. I was supposed to help you on the planet and instead I destroyed your plan."

Morita touched a hand to Lorca's shoulder and asked, "What happened?"

Lorca released Lalana from the hug and she sat back on her haunches and explained. For the majority of the time inside the crate, everything had been fine, but when the crate was moved into the shuttle, it had gotten jostled. The transponder piece on the right side of her neck had slid out of place, shifting her brainstem – one of the few specialized internal structures she had. "It was like I was no longer there," she said. "There was no inner me. But, when you picked me up, I could sense you. My outer me could still sense you."

"Outer you?" said Serot, listening in.

"All lului are of two selves," said Linali. "Our inner-self is who we are. Our outer-self is the rest of our awareness."

"Because all your cells function like brain cells," said Lorca. Linali's hands spun.

"My brainstem was no longer signaling the rest of me like it should have. Without the feedback and control it gives the rest of me, my cells were confused and no longer understood their place in the whole." Which was why she had seemed like a crumpled pile of laundry. "But what happened to you? You look terrible!"

He laughed, wincing in pain as he did. "I feel terrible!" He relayed the details of his adventure.

Lalana looked over at Zark's corpse. "I can't believe you killed the Gorn!"

Lorca's eyes went wide. " _That's_ the Gorn!?" he said, incredulous. He had written it into his initial Starfleet report, but like the Ferengi and so many of the other species Lalana had mentioned, he'd had no idea what it actually was until this moment. Lalana clicked her tongue.

"You did not know that was a Gorn?" said Serot. "No wonder you were brave enough to fight it."

The white lului spoke. "It was very surprising when you fell into my pond. In all three cycles of hunting, no one has ever found me in there."

"I was beginning to think you had been hunted yourself," said Linali. "Your presence in the air was missed, Lalaila." They pressed their sides together, mingling their skin filaments.

Morita remembered Lualel's recognition of Lalana. "Do all lului know each other? How many of you are there?"

"At present? Four hundred eighty-seven million, six hundred and sixty-three thousand, five-hundred and ninety-one," said Linali.

"Do you not know all of your species?" asked Lalaila.

"Humans only live about a cycle," said Lalana. "And there are billions of them. They do not live long enough to meet each other, and they do not merge."

"Well obviously they don't merge," said Linali. "They have genders! Why do they seem to think you are a female?"

"Oh, their translation machine mistook present and past pronouns as male and female when I came aboard their ship. I decided to keep it. It made things easier for them, linguistically."

Lorca stared at Lalana. "You're not... This whole time?"

"What sort of primitives do you think we are!" objected Linali. "You're the primitive species."

Lalana pressed her tail over Lorca's hand. "I like being female. Please continue to think of me as such."

Linali trilled his tongue. "You are still like a tree in a grassland, Lalana."

"Better a grassland than a forest, Linali."

"But trees belong in the forest!" wailed Lalaila, covering her eyes with her tail.

The three lului descended into bickering about what it was like to be a tree and whether or not a tree belonged in a grassland. Finally Linali and Lalaila withdrew, the argument far from settled. Lalana scooted herself over besides Lorca and pressed against his arm. "I am very sorry my people are so rooted." Lorca wondered if the pun was intentional or just idiomatic given the significance of trees. "Also, I must thank you, you have saved me again."

Lorca winced, this time not from the physical pain. "I almost killed you."

"Yes, but if you and Reiko had not insisted on seeing me, they would not have restored me, they would have left me in that state until the next cycle."

"Explain."

"Absent my motor control, I would have had no choice but to undergo a Great Merge when the comet arrived."

Lorca shuddered. Even if he did not completely understand, he understood enough to register a sense of dread, especially in light of Lualel's attempt to do _something_ with Lalana back in the tent. He quickly changed the subject. "Do you know what we're waiting for? They said something. Oo-ma-lay?"

"Umale is the oldest lului, the preserver of our legacy." So it wasn't a term, but a name.

"How old is..." Lorca almost said "he," but now knew that to be entirely wrong. "It?"

"Eight hundred and fourteen cycles."

Lorca swore in amazement. "Anything else I should know?"

"Nn, the other lului wish you would remove your clothes like the Shkef, and eat the Gorn. They are very upset about that."

Linali's overt superiority complex had ticked Lorca off. So had Lualel's attitude, and the jury was still out on Lalaila, especially in light of the fact they would have left Lalana a vegetable for twenty-five years to force her to merge against her will. He no longer cared what the lului at large thought. "And what do you think we should do?"

"Whatever the Hell you want!"

"Ha!—Ow! God damn it."

"Please do not laugh, Gabriel!" said Lalana, tongue clicking.

"Then stop being funny!" He grinned through the pain and put his arm around her. She spun her hands in happiness and did not tell any more jokes for at least ten minutes.


	22. Umale

As day turned to night, Morita and Serot moved around the area the lului had designated for them, fastidiously avoiding the Gorn corpse. Most of the lului barely moved at all. They seemed to lack the restlessness of most species, perfectly happy to perch in one spot for hours on end. Eventually, Serot curled up on the ground and fell asleep, spear beside her, and Morita went to sit against the tree with Lorca and Lalana.

It was dark, but still quite warm. Without the sun, the full glory of the Briar Patch's carpet of red gases was on display, illuminating everything in a faint red glow. It was so strangely alien. There were a few stars here and there, but this deep in the Briar Patch cloud, most of the stars were obscured. Maybe that was why the lului had never sought to explore space. If you could only see a few stars, could you truly understand the full breadth of the universe? Could you fully imagine the many worlds that might be out there? Or did you think you were alone in it all until strange invaders landed and tried to make your planet their own?

"I miss the stars," said Lorca.

"Me, too," said Lalana.

Morita didn't mind the display of red. If anything, she found it comforting. Like a beautiful red blanket wrapped around the planet. She kept this observation to herself and yawned.

"You should get some rest. That's an order, lieutenant commander."

Morita crossed her arms and glared at him in the darkness. "After you, sir."

Lorca remembered what Yoon had said. "You really can't fall asleep if I'm awake?"

Morita shrugged, close enough her arm brushed his. "I'll try, but... it feels like I'm being watched."

"That's because all the lului are watching us," said Lalana from Lorca's other side. Morita sighed. That didn't help.

The lului also seemed not to sleep. They maintained a low, gentle murmur of conversation among themselves that ebbed and flowed but never fully stopped. Lorca closed his eyes at some point, and Morita did, too.

He woke up with Lalana's tail in his hair and Morita's head on his shoulder, a faint dribble from her mouth on his shirt. Falling asleep upright against a tree had done absolutely nothing good for all his aches and pains.

He wasn't sure what had woken him up until he made out the dim silhouette of Serot in the faint red light. She was standing with her spear in conversation with a lului he did not recognize.

"...is my life," Serot was saying. "Without this, I am nothing."

"You must destroy it. There is no other way. Without it, I do not have the materials to fix the transponder."

"There are other materials, caches you have destroyed. I know this. Fetch them. Kill-stick is who I am."

"And yet, for you to become who you want to be, you must let it go regardless."

"You said it will be five thousand more days before the cycle and this can be done. I wish to retain my spear until then."

"Then you will go with the hunters when the hunt ends."

Serot let out a small wail.

"There are always sacrifices," said the unknown lului. "Now give me your spear. Be glad this sacrifice is so small."

Lorca nudged Morita awake with his shoulder and got to his feet. "Umale?"

"Captain Lorca," said the lului. "Your transponder will be fixed soon."

Umale was smaller than the other lului. Lorca could not quite tell what color it was. It looked reddish, but in this light, so did Lalana, and Lalaila looked pink.

"I take it your original signal was rather weak or your ship would have arrived by now. I will make some improvements and your ship should have no trouble locating our planet. We will be vigilant and inform you when it arrives."

Lorca pressed a hand against an ache in his shoulder, feeling a twinge from his ribs as he did. "How..." He wasn't even sure what question he wanted to ask. "Improvements?" He felt Lalana stand beside him and press herself against his leg. He brought his arm back down and touched her back.

Umale turned back to Serot. "Your spear, Serot of the Shkef, and I will grant you what you seek."

Serot twirled the spear vertically in her fingers so the blade spun like a little upside-down top. She knelt and handed the weapon to Umale with both hands.

"Thank you. I will give you a new name. Soars-gladly. Put that into your tongue."

"Shel-lif," said Serot, sounding somewhat less than glad.

"You are free to go and do what you wish. I cannot guarantee the other hunters will not find you, but all lului will assist you in hiding if you need. It is now painted on the wind that they do so." Umale addressed the assembled lului. "I will now utilize the old ways. Any lului who does not wish to be privy to such a thing, please replace yourself in the sensory array with one who will tolerate it."

There was a shuffle in the trees. Though it was difficult to make out, it seemed like all of the lului turned their backs.

"I cannot watch this," said Serot, dashing away and expanding her membranes. She leapt into the air and soared into the air, a dark shadow vanishing into the night.

It was very hard to tell what Umale was doing in the darkness. Lorca realized there was a sack on the ground next to Umale. Umale took something out of it with its tail. An object. An actual, physical lului object.

Umale did something with the object, the spear, and the transponder. Lorca saw a flash of sparks and the blade of the spear glowed red. Umale pressed the spear's blade against the transponder, wrapped something around both, and then wrapped its tail around the arrangement.

"What are you doing?" asked Morita.

"As it looks," said Umale, explaining nothing.

The shaft of the spear fell away. There was a crackling electrical noise and a series of tiny clicks. Something shifted inside Umale's tail. More crackling, more clicks. Another shift. The sequence repeated four more times and then Umale was done. It opened its tail and the transponder light was a bright, solid blue.

"I encoded a route into the signal. I pray no one else listening knows your encryption codes. Of course, the hunters will be able to detect this signal now, but we will keep the device itself away from them until its function is complete, as distasteful a task as that may be." Umale handed the transponder to a lului Lorca thought was Linali.

"Umale," said maybe-Linali, and bounded away into the night.

"The hunters will doubtless come to search this area for you now. I suggest you move elsewhere on the planet. Current sensor technologies are not excellent at penetrating rock, are they? Then I would suggest the caves with the open water vents. Lalana knows where they are. And as for you, Lalana."

Lalana suddenly shifted position, moving behind Lorca as if to hide, and curled her tail around his ankles.

"Come to the Deepwater Hive when you are done with this escort. I have need of you."

"Umale," said Lalana softly.

Umale picked up the bag and turned to go. "Wait!" said Lorca. "We want to talk to you."

"What makes you think I want to talk to you?"

"We represent the United Federation of Planets, a peaceful coalition of worlds—"

"Yes, I am aware of you," said Umale.

Lorca did not hide his surprise. "We're on a mission of exploration. To that end, we'd like to know more about you and your people—"

"You already know too much."

"If you'll just answer a few questions—"

"Three questions."

Lorca blinked. He had not expected that. "We're really more interested in a deeper exchange of information..."

"Three questions, and you ask them now, or nothing."

Lorca wondered why Umale had chosen three given the lului dislike for the number. Perhaps it was intended as an insult. It certainly felt that way. He quickly tried to figure out the three most important questions to ask.

Umale waited, then turned away.

"Wait!" Lorca blurted out the first question on his mind. "I thought you didn't use technology. How did you fix the transponder?"

Umale was generous enough to address the heart of what Lorca was asking. "Lului do not use technology, but that does not mean we have never had technology. We chose to abandon it to become better. Technology is a distraction from the truth of being present and alive. Your transponder was very crude compared to what we once lived with, and easily amplified."

Lorca struggled to think of how to follow this up. Being asked to suddenly generate three questions on demand seemed like a sick joke. He looked to Morita.

"What do we need to know about your people? What's the right question to ask?" Morita managed. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean for that to be two—"

"It is one question worded twice," said Umale. "There is no right or wrong question, and there is nothing you need to know about us. If you are as good as the words you have given Lalana, you will leave this world and not set foot on it again so that we may continue on our path as we have chosen it. I know that who we are can attract a great deal of curiosity, so the most important thing to know about us is that we are not here for your amusement."

"Are all your people jerks?" said Lorca under his breath to Lalana, not intending it as an actual question, but Umale answered it.

"As are all of yours," replied Umale. "As are all intelligent beings. Selfish, short-sighted, and self-righteous. We cannot live with ourselves unless we believe ourselves to be right. Kindness is something we extend only to ourselves, and anyone who is kind to others is saying they believe the others to be a part of themselves. There is always a limit to this consideration, usually triggered by a difference in an aspect of belief, and there are always those who would take advantage of this generosity of self. Whether it is better to be the abuser or the abused is a more important question, but the third option is to be a jerk to everyone and save all involved the trouble of an imbalance of kindness. I hope this satisfied your curiosity. Goodbye." Umale slid the bag over its shoulder and seemed to fade away into the ground. (Probably Umale had just changed its color so they could not make it out in the reddish-dark.)

"Did..." Morita began to say. "Did you just..."

Lorca held up a finger. "Don't." He covered his face with his hand. "Argh!"

"Do not be upset, that was the best question," said Lalana cheerfully. She patted Lorca's bottom twice with her tail, making him snort in amusement at the impropriety of it and then exclaim as pain shot through his ribcage. "What? I was not telling a joke!"

"Let's just get out of here," Lorca said through gritted teeth. "Which way to those caves?"

* * *

As they headed to the caves, the topic of Serot came up. "Or is it Shel-lif now?" wondered Lorca. "What the hell was she talking to Umale about?"

"He said he would make her into a lului," answered Lalana. She had apparently decided lului did need genders assigned for the sake of convenience in English conversation. It probably wasn't the most respectful thing to do given the general lului disdain for gender as a concept. Then again, Umale had basically said it was preferable for everyone to be massive jerks to one another, so it served him right.

The gender issue was not what Lorca tripped over. "What!"

"I do not know if it will work, but, it will be very interesting if it does."

"How would it even work?" asked Morita.

"You would join the cycle merge, and your body would be replaced by lului cells, leaving your brainstem, and I am not entirely sure a shkef brainstem is compatible with lului cells, but maybe it is. Umale tasted her and seemed to think it would work. He would know better than I."

"Serot really loves your people," said Lorca, shaking his head. Morita snorted derisively and Lorca shot her a look.

"Yeah, she totally loves lului," said Morita sarcastically. "When I asked her to fetch me a live one, she speared Lualen in the leg and dropped him from a height of, oh, two hundred feet maybe?"

Lorca's eyes went wide. "Geez."

"We were lucky she's so loyal to 'clients.'"

"How so?"

Morita froze. "Isn't that... why you told me to get her to help?"

Lorca threw up his hands. "I thought she liked lului! She must! She wants to be one!"

"It is not so much that she wants to be a lului," said Lalana, "as Umale told her that was the only condition he would let her stay on Luluan."

Lorca sputtered. "If she doesn't like lului..."

"...and she knew we weren't real clients, didn't she? Why was she helping us?"

Lalana clicked her tongue. "Because of the wind," she said. "You really don't understand shkef, do you? They do entirely what the wind tells them. They shift with the currents. That is why she likes Luluan so much. The air is very warm."

"So, when she gave me the spear..."

"I doubt she was giving it to you. She was probably just dropping it to see where it landed. You were lucky it didn't hit you." Lalana had very much enjoyed the Gorn story, and had already made Lorca retell it twice, declaring it only got better each time she heard it.

Lorca suddenly got the impression the spear had been intended to kill him. When it hadn't and he had instead used it to kill the Gorn, Serot had interpreted that as a sign. Half a foot to the right and the story would have had the exact opposite ending.

"We should keep moving," said Morita.

"This way."

The forest gave way to rocky hillsides as the sky began to lighten with the first trace of dawn. They had to slow down slightly to ascend the hillside; though they could make out enough of the terrain to move, the rocks were loose. Lorca was in enough pain without falling on top of it all.

A dark shadow loomed in front of them. The maw of a cave. It looked spectacularly uninviting.

"We need a torch," said Lorca, fully aware they had no access to any accelerants.

"It is light inside," promised Lalana.

As slow as they had gone up the hill, entering the cave reduced them to a crawl. Only Lalana could see anything. She took the lead and Lorca held on to her tail for guidance in the darkness, shuffling his feet. Morita, in turn, kept hold of Lorca's shirt.

It was hard to tell how far they had gone, but eventually, Lorca thought he saw a faint glow ahead. Morita saw it, too. There was a bubbling sound. It began to get warm and humid.

They rounded a bend and found themselves staring into a large cavern, its walls coated with bioluminescent bacteria of some kind. Even more impressive, the cave contained a series of steaming pools of water that glowed with the same bioluminescence. There were even glowing flecks of light drifting on the steamy air.

"They turn the heat from the water into light," said Lalana of the bacteria.

"An onsen!" said Morita, the first time she had been truly happy since dinner.

There were lului here, in the water. They ducked their heads down and disappeared into the depths somewhere.

Morita checked the water temperature and practically tore off her clothes. She slid into the water with an absolute moan of relief. "It's perfect! Come on!"

Seeing as he had been invited, Lorca gingerly sat down and began pulling off his boots. He stripped down to underwear for decency's sake.

The giant purple bruise along the side of his torso looked truly terrible illuminated and magnified by the water, but the warmth felt amazing, soothing his sore muscles and battered ribcage, and the buoyancy of the water took a lot of the stress off his joints. He found a rock formation perfect for reclining against and just relaxed while Morita rinsed her hair in the water and swam and generally moved around with the sort of joy that people who grew up with a pool feel after having gone without for far too long.

Morita let out a gasp of delight and held up her hand. Bioluminescent bacteria were clinging to her skin.

"You're glowing!" Lorca called to her.

She laughed. "So are you!" Lorca lifted his own hand from the water and discovered it was true. "These aren't flesh-eating, right?"

"Perfectly harmless," promised Lalana. Then she strode into the water, announced, "I will return," and dove in.

Lorca sat up just in time to watch her go. He had not seen a lului swim before and was amazed at the way Lalana shot through the water like a missile, her filaments and tail propelling her forward. The pools extended into a series of underwater tunnels. Lalana vanished into one. Lorca wondered if she was going to "Deepwater Hive" as Umale had asked.

If she was, Deepwater Hive was a lot closer than its name suggested, because she returned within fifteen minutes covered with something entwined in her filaments. These mystery objects turned out to be chubby, writhing worms between three and five inches long and ranging in thickness between a cigar and a pinky finger.

"I thought you might be hungry," Lalana said. "There are milulae. Would you like them live or dead? I can kill them for you, just don't tell anyone I did."

None of them had eaten in about a day. It was to the point where Lorca felt like he was past hunger, so he wondered if he might skip on this offering, generous as it was.

Morita, of course, took a live worm and bit into it. Juices squirted out. She chewed it. "It's like a softer version of octopus," she declared.

"Exactly!" said Lalana.

"It could be poisonous," warned Lorca.

"I promise they contain no toxins."

"If I'm dead in fifteen minutes, you'll have your answer," said Morita. After ten minutes, she seemed fine, so Lorca tentatively ate a dead one. It did remind him of octopus, but more creamy and less chewy. Of course, once he actually ate something, he realized how hungry he was, but he was too worried about gastrointestinal distress to make more than a very small meal of the worms.

He returned to soaking with his eyes closed, opening them only when he heard a small splash. Lalana was in the water next to him. She sidled up alongside and plonked down directly at his side. Her filaments tickled. He closed his eyes.

A few minutes later he opened his eyes, realizing something was amiss, and looked down. The bruise on his side had lightened several shades. "What are you doing?"

"All the little branches in your skin are broken, I'm just fixing them."

Lorca groaned loudly. "Ask next time."

"Do you want me to stop?" He shrugged and closed his eyes again. By the time he decided to get out of the water, it looked like his bruise was several days old and mostly healed.

A lului appeared in the water while they were drying off. "Your people here," it said, then disappeared. Lorca and Morita exchanged a look. The odyssey was finally over.


	23. The Smallest Gifts Mean the Most

As the Triton arrived in orbit around Luluan, three things happened.

First, the merchant ship in orbit _noped_ the hell out of there, abandoning its shuttlecraft on the planet.

Second, Arzo reported scanners showed more Gentonians on the planet than in the escaping ship, and no sign of any humans.

Third, Commander Benford was forced to make a split second decision, much as Lorca had when he fell in the pond, with the chief difference that Benford managed to ace his and achieve both his goals rather than none.

"After that ship!" he ordered. "As safely as we can!"

The safety directive turned out to be crucial. While the Triton gave chase at low impulse with a mind towards not crashing into explosive pockets of gas or unstable spatial anomalies, the Gentonian cruiser did not, frantically departing at full impulse. Within eight minutes, it was totally disabled and drifting as its skeleton crew, convinced they had experienced a catastrophic hull breach by malfunctioning sensors, panicked and fought over who got to get into the escape pods, not realizing they had enough escape pods for all of them three times ove because they were too terrified to open the doors to access the pods on the other side of the ship. (They still could have all fit into the two escape pods they were fighting over if push came to shove, which unfortunately it had.) The mission to apprehend them immediately became a rescue and the offenders were safely transported to the Triton's brig.

Once Billingsley was aboard the Gentonian ship, she had it up and running in fifteen minutes.

"Idiots," she said over the comms. "They didn't modulate their deflectors to account for the metaphasic radiation interference at that speed. Their circuits were completely unshielded. They didn't even blow them. They just got scrambled."

"And now?" asked Benford.

"Unscrambled. Give me a pilot and we're set."

"Like turning an omelet into a chicken," said Benford smoothly, congratulating himself on Billingsley's success.

"What?" she demanded, equally confused and annoyed. Eggs weren't a staple of her childhood and she had never personally seen a live chicken.

The Triton was back at Luluan half an hour later, where it picked up the shuttle trying to escape. "We surrender," were the first words out of Egarell's mouth when the Triton hailed. Benford happily accepted this surrender and congratulated himself again.

"Commander, picking up human life signs. Faint. I am detecting a cave system."

"Can we beam them up?"

"No. I cannot even confirm the number. They are too far underground."

Benford considered. "We got all the guys, right?" he asked, referring to the merchants.

"All that were present," confirmed Arzo. There was still the matter of Venel's side of the operation.

Benford itched to go down to the planet, but Arzo was the clear choice to beam down, and Arzo was third in command. If they both went, that would put the four most senior officers on the planet, and Billingsley was on the Gentonian ship. Russo would be acting captain. It was hard to imagine Russo handling a crisis well. Benford sighed and settled down into the captain's chair. "Take Larsson."

* * *

They beamed down in front of the mouth of the cave. The first thing Larsson did was start to remove his uniform jacket.

"Lieutenant, what are you doing?"

"It's hot!" said Larsson.

"Your uniform is well-ventilated."

"I don't like it."

Arzo rolled his eyes. He and Larsson had both been serving on the Triton for years, and he knew a losing battle when he saw it. The old crew nickname for Larsson was "the steamroller" both because of the Swede's ability to physically manhandle just about anything, and for his stubbornness. Small surprise Larsson was still stuck at the rank of lieutenant and unlikely to ever be promoted.

"Hey!" a voice called from inside the cave.

Arzo was genuinely relieved to hear the captain's voice. Lorca, Morita, and Lalana emerged from the darkness of the cave's interior. Apparently they had been on their way out while Arzo and Larsson were beaming down.

"You have got to get in there. It's a hot spring," said Lorca. He looked like he had been in a fight, but seemed perfectly happy.

"Unsurprising," said Arzo. "The planet contains a wealth of geothermal vents."

Lorca stopped short. Having spent the better part of two days on Luluan, it was off-putting to discover Arzo probably already knew more about the planet than he did thanks to the Triton's scanners. "Yes, well, did you know it glows?"

Secretly, Arzo had missed the captain's affection for one-upping everyone, but he did not let it show. Like Benford, he knew better than to stroke the captain's ego, because it could turn him absolutely insufferable when that ego was left unchecked. "It glows?" he said impassively.

"The rocks, the water, the air, even you if you go for a swim. Anyway!" Lorca rubbed his hands together. "Please tell me you brought food."

Larsson reached into the pocket of his jacket and offered Lorca a protein bar. Lorca decided he'd rather eat worms.

Lalana hopped forward twice, seemingly on alert. "What is it?" asked Lorca.

"Planetary gathering. Your presence is requested."

Arzo scanned the air. "Fascinating. I believe it is a type of pheromonal messaging system."

Lorca recalled a phrase Umale had used. Painted on the winds. Strange choice of words, he realized. Painted. Lului didn't paint. Maybe Umale did? "Guess our hosts are finally ready to talk."

* * *

Morita beamed back up to the Triton, freeing Benford to head down to the planet aboard the shuttle with Carver and Ek'Ez. While Lorca, Arzo, and Larsson could have beamed up and back down directly to the location of the gathering, that would have meant leaving Lalana behind, and Lorca wasn't prepared to do that yet. Not until this planetary gathering was complete, anyway.

As requested, Benford brought along an actual meal of ham, salad, gazpacho, and bread. Lorca sat on a rock and ate it overlooking the vast lului forest with its giant trees in the distance. He let Lalana taste everything on the plate, not caring if she licked his food, and caught sight of Larsson watching with disgust at the sight. Smirking, he doubled down on the offense and fed Lalana a piece of ham off his fork. Larsson looked away.

Ek'Ez insisted on performing at least a cursory exam aboard the shuttle. "I would prefer to take you back to sickbay, but, this will have to do for now," Ek'Ez said, injecting a painkiller. It was more than sufficient. Lorca felt immediately better. Moving was no longer an ongoing agony.

More importantly, Benford had also brought a fresh uniform. Lorca was glad to get rid of the civilian garb at last. He always felt more like himself when he had his uniform on.

Exiting the rear of the shuttle, he found Ek'Ez and Lalana deep in conversation and took a seat next to Lalana. It was the last seat available. Between Benford, Carver, Arzo, Larsson, Ek'Ez, Lalana, and Lorca, the shuttle was packed.

"...a state of unconsciousness, but not death?" Ek'Ez was asking.

"As long as there is still any sort of signal, the outer cells will not disintegrate."

Ek'Ez pondered this, putting it together with the earlier part of their conversation Lorca had missed. "Still. I do not see how Umale's plan will work. It's very unlikely the Shkef's cells are even remotely compatible. He will probably kill the Shkef."

"Yes, probably!" said Lalana, cheerful as ever. "But to think, if he can directly engineer a natural evolutionary process with foreign tissue, what a feat. And it is the only chance he will ever have to try, now that you have stopped the hunters."

"It does not seem very ethical," concluded Ek'Ez.

"I get the impression ethics aren't something Umale cares about," Lorca said.

Lalana leaned against Lorca's arm. "You are correct. He exists to remind us of our past follies. This is why everyone hates him."

Lorca squinted pensively. "I thought he was your leader."

"Oh, no, he is not even a member of our society."

Lorca noticed Larsson furiously scribbling notes across the shuttle. Apparently there were still subjects the historical survey had yet to cover. It was too bad they had so little time left.

"Captain!" called Benford. "You gotta see this."

Lorca jumped up and joined Carver and Benford in the front of the shuttle.

It was nowhere near half a billion lului, but there were thousands upon thousands of them, probably a quarter of a million. Possibly even more. The entire area was carpeted with a vast and chaotic patchwork of colors. It stretched on and on.

"Impressive, right?" said Lorca, as if this were old hat to him.

Carver pointed at something in the sky. "Look there!"

"That's Serot," said Lorca. The Shkef looked like a fleck of brown paper dancing on the wind.

The lului provided a space in the middle of the crowd for the shuttle to land. The din of incessant lului conversation was audible even before they opened the door. The shuttle seemed almost to vibrate with it.

Benford had a visual recorder with him transmitting to the Triton's archives. The whole ship watched live as the sea of multicolored lului revealed itself in detail.

There were lului of every color imaginable, and patterns ranging from geometric to impressionist. No two lului had the exact same pattern, or even seemed to be the same shade. One lului had seemingly perfect vertical black and white stripes. Another, cherry red with vibrant whirls of yellow. There was a blue one with a purple star shape on its head, and a yellow one crisscrossed with brown and blue strokes like calligraphy.

Several visual elements recurred. A few of the lului in the front had a sort of diagonal slash of white across their right shoulders, a white circle on their heads, and bands of white around their tails. Another section had black lines encircling their heads and large black circles on their chest. A third group had red rectangles on their shoulders and matching shapes on their head, and a fourth green circles covering the top half of their heads, almost like a knit cap pulled halfway down their eyes. Aside from these matching elements, each of these lului had their own base color and pattern, and so remained differentiated from its fellows. Lorca guessed the repeating elements were indicative of some sort of tribe, achievement, or rank.

A lului stepped forward with a dual-tone green face and chest surrounded by streaks of black and white lined with intricate black and white dots along the edges and across its back. It had a larger arrangement of alternating black and white dots on its forehead.

"I am Lului," it said. This lului, it would seem, was some sort of planetary representative or leader. At the very least, an appointed speaker for the whole.

Most of the dialogue that followed was not particularly notable. Introductions, greetings from the Federation, the terms of a protection agreement being offered by the Federation, and then the really hard sell: a translator and a communications relay in case anyone landed on the planet again.

"Look, you can't just go around smashing other races' technology," said Lorca. "You call us, and we'll come collect it for you, and in the meantime, you can use the translator and maybe they'll leave if you ask them nicely."

"Yes, but then we will be stuck with _your_ technology on our world!" said one of the lului with red rectangles.

"Give it to Umale, then. Umale can put it with the other things you hate."

"We don't want more technology, we want less!" howled a lului in the crowd.

The lului designated as Lului lifted its tail straight up. "We will trade it. That way, there will be no increase in technology. Someone go and take two things from Umale."

If Umale didn't like Lorca before, he certainly wasn't going to like Lorca now. "One thing!" countered Lorca. "Our things are small. Umale can combine our two things into one." Even if Umale was an unabashed jerk, it seemed unwise to completely offend the lului who was probably going to be tasked with operating the translator and transponder. Hopefully this act of charity would mitigate the sting of the trade Umale was about to be forced into.

Then they had to wait while the lului fetched an object from Umale, which took half an hour.

The object turned out to be a metal block. It had no markings on it, was about the size of an eyeglass case, and the lului who presented it to Lorca almost threw it at him in obvious disgust for having to touch the thing. Lorca picked it up off the ground. It weighed as much as a brick. "What is it?"

"How should we know?" asked a dark grey lului with red bands around its eyes and tail. Lorca gave the block to Arzo and hoped something good came out of the exchange.

"There is also the matter of your food," said Lului.

Lorca stared, not following.

"She means the Gorn," whispered Lalana. "He will take the food with him and eat it on his ship. Humans need to do something called grilling because their primitive stomachs get wounded if they try to eat natural food. They have a grill with them on their ship, but it is too big to bring here, so they will bring the food up there."

Lorca bit his lip and managed to keep a straight face through her explanation, but only barely. It was a good thing none of the other lului seemed to have any idea of the meanings behind human facial expressions. "Yeah. We'll do that," agreed Lorca. "What else?"

"I have something," said Lalana. "Humans are greatly bothered when other humans die, and one of them died in order to stop the hunting, so I wish for his name to be gifted at the next Great Merge and maintained always."

"What does this matter now? Bring it up at the merge," said a yellow lului.

"Because, the humans will not be here then, and they should know that we are giving them this honor," said Lalana.

Lului spoke. "A name is an easy gift to give. What is the name?"

"Wallulen."

"...Lallulen?"

"Ululen?"

"Wah!" said Lalana, loudly and clearly. "WAL-lulen. Lului doesn't have enough letters in it anyway. Just give the Starfleet humans one letter in all the words in our language so that all lului always remember that Starfleet wishes us the best for our world and helped us when we would not help ourselves."

The lului immediately began to practice this letter, a chorus of "wuh-weh-wah" sounds creating a cacophony rather like a colony of barking seals.

"We did not need help," said Lului, "but we will agree to this recognition. Wallulen is entered into the list of names for our people, and there will always be a Wallulen on Luluan."

Lalana turned to Lorca. "That was for Reiko," she said gravely.

Aboard the Triton, Morita sat in the captain's chair and smiled, a tear in her eye.

* * *

They went to retrieve the Gorn corpse as promised. Lalaila and Linali were sitting together in a tree nearby and did not flee when the landing party approached.

"Finally, you've come to clean up your mess," said Linali.

Benford was no longer recording, so Lorca said, "You're welcome for saving your planet."

"Humans have a very high opinion of themselves," said Lalaila.

"We have that in common," Lorca replied. Linali's tongue began to click and Lorca decided the orange lului probably wasn't so bad after all.

Benford watched this exchange with interest. He thought Lorca had been a little harsh at the gathering with all the lului, but then Lalana had been equally forceful in her request to commemorate Walter Chen, and Benford was beginning to realize that this vague rudeness was, if not the most effective method, at least something the lului found engagingly familiar.

Or maybe they were all just responding to Lorca's style in kind. Was that giving Lorca too much credit? Regardless, Benford doubted this adventure was going into the first contact handbook.

Arriving at the scene of Lorca's great battle, they found the Gorn's corpse covered in worms. Parts of its skull were already visible. Ek'Ez gaped at it, rightly horrified. "Captain, surely you are not suggesting... "

"It's the terms of the treaty, doctor."

Ek'Ez's eyes blinked in a line. "I sincerely hope he has no family who were counting on having this body returned to them."

While Ek'Ez arranged what he considered to be a sufficient medical quarantine for a worm-ridden body, Lorca and Benford went for a walk. "It doesn't look like I expected," said Benford, touching the trunk of a tree. "Somehow I thought it'd look more alien. I mean, don't get me wrong, there's those giant trees off in the distance, but from here... It kind of reminds me of the Black Forest."

"It's what you can't see," said Lorca. "Take that moss over there. That whole section of ground has water underneath it. Step on it, you'll fall right through."

Benford looked around. "There's a _lot_ of moss."

Lorca shrugged. "In a way, we're standing over an ocean. It just happens to have trees growing on top. And look up." Benford obliged. "What do you see?"

"Trees. Branches. Leaves? Sunlight."

"There's probably a dozen lului up there, watching us. You wouldn't even know they're there unless they want you to."

"You really think there's that many?"

"I'd bet you anything in the galaxy."

Benford laughed. "Fine, I believe you!"

They walked for a bit in silence. Then Benford said, "We should head back."

Lorca took a deep breath. The heady scent of sap meant nothing to him, but he knew to a lului, it might contain a message. He wondered what it said.

There was a whistling sound. Something swooped through the trees and landed in front of them. The Shkef. "The winds have brought me to you again," she said.

Benford blinked at the sight of the naked alien woman as her membranes slid back into her body. She stepped behind a tree in false modesty, her head poking around the trunk. "Jack, this is Serot. Or is it Shel-lif now?"

"It matters not. But I have a proposal for you, captain. May we speak alone?"

Lorca shrugged a shoulder at Benford. "Watch out for the ground moss," he advised as Benford headed back. "What can I do for you, Serot? Having second thoughts about Umale's plan to turn you into a lului? My doctor tells me it'll probably kill you. I don't imagine it'll be a nice way to go, your body melting while your brain remains intact. Probably feel every moment." He had not forgotten that she had probably been intending to kill him all of fifty yards away.

She stepped out from behind the tree. "If that is how I go, then, wind's will be done."

"So you're not here to beg me to take you back to the Triton?"

She began to move towards him, slowly but purposefully. "It occurs to me that once you leave this world, I will likely never see another humanoid ever again. The winds of this world are wonderful and inviting, but I would be lying if I said there were not things that I will miss. Things only humanoids can do together."

Her hips swayed with each step. She was almost arm's length from him now, her brown eyes fixed intently on his. "Things that perhaps you would do with the woman with whom you were not married." She was wrong there, in a big way, but also right in equal measure. Two more steps brought her close enough to feel the rush of his breath on her face, her head tilted longingly up at him.

"Will you give me something to remember the stars by?"

His face broke into a smile. "I think that can be arranged."


	24. The Lului's Secret

A/N: Twenty-four chapters ago I wrote the last scene in this chapter. It was the first scene written. It took a long time to get here, but at least one secret can now be told. Probably it's not the one you started reading for, but we'll get to the other secret in the end.

* * *

Lalana was in the shuttle when he got back, chattering away with Larsson, apparently willing to give Larsson every minute up to the last for his history project. "Is there somewhere you want us to drop you?" Lorca asked, interrupting them.

"I must return to the ship," she said.

He considered the request, phrased as it was like a demand. "I don't think your people are going to like it if we bring the shuttle back down again."

"They will understand."

"Will they now?" he challenged her. The lului were a lot of things, but very rarely understanding in his experience. The fact that they had made the disposal of a single corpse a crucial negotiating point proved that. Now he had a decomposing body on this ship. (It was unlikely they were going to be able to return Zark to his people and Ek'Ez had elected not to freeze the Gorn so he could study both it and the worms eating it. It was as close to a Luluan medical research expedition as Ek'Ez was going to get.)

"I have to get my things and I wish to speak to Margeh and T'rond'n," she said, answering a question he had not asked.

He balked, incredulous. "Margeh and T'rond'n? Margeh – and – T'rond'n? They think you're dead." And according to Benford, they were calling for his head on a platter, which, if they figured out Lalana was alive and well, they very well might get. Skirting the edge of the knife was fun only so long as he didn't get cut too badly.

"They will not know it's me." She shifted in color to a pale egg cream yellow with a splash of darker yellow on her chest and accents of red on her head, hands, and tail. Larsson let out an approving grunt.

Lorca frowned thoughtfully and gnashed his teeth. He did want to see the Dartarans get some more comeuppance. That was something he never tired of watching. And what were the lului going to do if he did send the shuttle down again? Shoot it out of the sky with their eyes? Yell at him? Refuse to call Starfleet for help the next time strangers landed on their world?

"All right," he said, and smacked the side of the shuttle with his hand. "Carver! Let's get this show on the road."

* * *

"You're not gonna make me look bad in there, are you?"

"I do not think I could. You look excellent."

They were standing outside the guest quarters currently hosting Margeh and T'rond'n, which happened to be next the guest quarters Lalana had been using, because that was the sum total of guest quarters on the ship.

Lorca sniffed in amusement. "If we can be serious. You understand what's at stake? You _cannot_ let them figure out who you are."

"I promise they will not," she said, her tail twitching. "I assure you, I am more than capable of fooling them, I did it for six years."

Lorca glanced up at the ceiling. Probably he was insane for letting her do this, but there was no denying it sounded like fun. He sighed and shook his head. "Here goes."

The past few days aboard the Triton had done nothing to diminish Margeh's anger. Seeing the source of all her woes in the flesh for the first time, her response was a hissing yell as she jumped to her feet. "Captain!"

Then she saw the lului beside him. It immediately cowed her. Based upon her understanding of the situation, the lului were the ones to make the determination as to the nature and prosecution of her crime. She swallowed her anger and balled her claws into fists at her side.

T'rond'n moved to stand beside his wife, folding his own claws into the long, flowing sleeves of his jacket. He and Margeh cut a less than impressive pair in person. Given how much time Lorca had spent watching them on the viewscreen, he had forgotten how short Dartarans were. Not Lalana's height, but the species averaged five and a half feet, and Margeh and T'rond'n were nothing if not decidedly average in this regard.

"Margeh, T'rond'n, allow me to introduce Lolalen, the lului representative."

Lalana stepped forward with her hands lightly folded in front of her. "Hunters of Dartar," she intoned, raising her hands up as she spoke, "heed my words!"

She'd gone over the gist of her remarks with him, but hadn't mentioned she was planning on making it a performance. Lorca immediately set his jaw and swallowed. Absolutely no laughing. His reaction was as much a part of whether or not the Dartarans bought this charade as anything else.

Lalana was not making it easy. "You have been known to trespass on the world of Luluan, sovereign domain of the lului! You have engaged with the foul facilitators of countless murders of my people, and have kidnapped and killed two of our kind! From our friends in the Starfleet we have learned that you planned to return and commit these acts of depravity on our world a second time!"

It was over-the-top, but in such a grandiose, ceremonial way, Lorca almost found himself buying it. The scale had tipped so far towards ridiculous, it had swung back around to the ring of truth. "The Starfleet" was a nice touch.

"For these crimes, we would have every right to demand your heads." Lalana lowered her hands and hooked her fingers together, pulling so her forearms were stretched out horizontally. "We are, however, not entirely without mercy. Though the Starfleet tells us you intended to come to Luluan with full knowledge of the magnitude of the crimes you were to commit, and your guilt in past crimes is unquestionable—"

(This was an overstatement. Technically, Lalaran had killed himself, and from the Dartarans' perspective, so had Lalana. At most, kidnapping by ignorance and attempted murder, both of which a decent legal defense would have been able to counter in this circumstance.)

"—we have chosen to gift you with our mercy in light of your friendship with Lalana. We lului are possessed of extraordinary gifts which can connect our consciousnesses with our brethren across the breadth of the cosmos."

Lorca tensed. _Wait, what?_ She was going off script. Way, way off script.

"You, T'rond'n of the Dartar, have exhibited kindness for a member of my people when you had no need to. For this reason and this reason only, we grant you freedom from all charges and offenses against our people. Your ship will be returned to you and you may return to your lives with a degree of freedom you did not grant any of my people. "

Lorca cleared his throat. "I hope you understand how lucky you are. We were prepared to fully back the lului people in whatever they decided." Calling them "people" served to underscore the seriousness of what the Dartaran couple had done.

Margeh listened to this, downcast, and T'rond'n stood still as a statue. Margeh finally spoke. "We apologize."

As soon as they were back in the corridor, Lalana began clicked her tongue and doubled over, rolling onto the floor and kicking up her feet. Lorca was much less amused. "What was that!" he practically hissed at her. "We didn't agree to that—psychic crap!"

Lalana rolled back to her feet. "No, but just think how mad Margeh will be! She will never forget how the reason they escaped justice was because of T'rond'n's soft heart. Think how that will make her feel!" Lalana smacked her tail against the corridor and resumed tongue-clicking.

Lorca pressed a hand to his face and growled with displeasure. He started to tell her never to do that again, but then he remembered she was about to leave the ship, and never again went without saying. "I wish you'd told me you were going to do that."

"I am sorry. I did not think of it until I saw their faces. But it was pretty good, nn? An effective joke."

He sighed. "Practical. It's 'practical joke.'"

"Practical _and_ effective."

* * *

Lorca left Lalana with Yoon, who promised to escort her on a small farewell tour and give her "every last anchovy on the ship" as a farewell present. It was time to get back to the grind of running a starship.

He found the bridge crew in good spirits. The brig was full of bad guys, the planet was saved, and the image of hundreds of thousands of lului gathered together was still fresh in their minds. All in all, a resounding success. He left Benford in the chair and proceeded to the ready room.

There was a message from Starfleet. The USS Calgary had been dispatched with an orbital monitor to supplement the devices Lorca had provided Umale and take some of the prisoners from the overcrowded brig. It would be there in twelve hours.

He sent a yeoman for some fresh coffee as he drafted a preliminary summary to send to Starfleet Command. The full reports could wait until tomorrow at least. It wasn't the yeoman but Carver who appeared with the pot, and true to form, it smelled heavenly. "Welcome back, sir," she said, leaving the pot on his desk.

"Good to be home," he said in thanks, and it was.

There were only three stars visible out his window as he sipped at the coffee, but by this time tomorrow, there would be so many stars out that window, even a lului wouldn't live long enough to count them.

The door chimed. "Enter."

It was Lalana. She stepped inside hesitantly, her hands pressed tightly together, her tail flicking back and forth. Lorca smiled, glad to see her. "Lalana. Ready to go home?"

She didn't respond immediately, and when she did, it was not to answer his question. "Please..." The smile faded from Lorca's face, replaced by concern. She pressed her hands tightly against her chest and tilted her head downward. "Please..."

He set his coffee down with a rising sense of alarm. "What's wrong?"

Had she tear ducts, she would have cried. Instead, the myriad tendrils of her fur curled and coiled and writhed with distress, giving her a rough, undulating texture. Her tail pressed over her eyes. "Please. I don't want to go."

Lorca took a deep breath and exhaled appraisingly. "You'll be safe down there, I promise. No one will ever hunt you or any of your people ever again. I guarantee it. And that's not just me talking, that's the whole Federation and all of Starfleet."

Her tail slid downward and she looked at him, revealing all twelve pupils expanded so wide her eyes looked black with only the merest threads of green. Her voice seemed to explode, much louder than he had ever heard her speak before. "I never told you!"

Lorca was taken aback by the shout. Confusion and dismay etched into the worry on his face.

Her eyes retracted back to normal and her voice quieted. "Gabriel, I—I let them catch me. I... I chose Margeh and T'rond'n because when they took Lalaran, they did not kill him. I knew they would not kill me. I knew they would take me with them, and eventually I could escape."

Realization dawned on Lorca. That was why she had known all the species of hunters who had come to Luluan. She had studied them, looking for the ones who took live prey. After a moment, he managed, "Because you wanted to stop the people hunting you." He wanted it to be true, but he could tell it wasn't.

"No. Why would I want to stop the hunters?" She began to shake. Not vibration, but full-body trembling. "They were my only way to see the stars. I..." Her tail slid over her eyes again. "I wanted to leave Luluan! I wanted to meet all the people and see their worlds, and now that I have—I can't go back! Please! I would rather die than go back!" Her legs gave way and she collapsed into a ball on the floor. Her face pitched towards the ground with such force he heard the surface of her eyes impact with the floor panels.

Lorca rounded the desk and dropped down to one knee beside her, putting a hand on her back. Her fur writhed under his fingers. He gave her a gentle shake. "Hey." She let out a warbling trill of abject misery. "You don't mean that. Don't you want to be with your people?"

Her head rose. He thought she was beginning to emerge from her ball, but then she slammed her head back down against the floor again, and again. He quickly got his arm around her to prevent her doing it a third time and shook her more forcefully. "Stop! Stop it!" he shouted angrily. While her raised voice had not been enough to draw the attention of the bridge, his was. The door chimed. He shouted at it, too. "No!"

He had not meant for his words to elicit a demonstration of the strength of her intent. He pulled her towards him and hugged her against his chest, ignoring the way the flow of her twisting tendrils made his skin crawl in response.

She tried to speak, sputtering out a few syllables, but forming no words. He comforted her so quietly, it barely even registered as a whisper, "It's okay. It's alright."

Her words finally emerged: "You are my people. You travel the stars. I want to do what you do, go where you go. I want to run as far and as fast as I can and see everything."

It wasn't clear if she meant him, specifically, or humanity. Maybe it didn't matter. Maybe it did. In Spanish and in so many other languages, he would have been able to tell, but not in English.

She turned her head up towards him. "There are... there are so many stars!"

There were. Not visible in Luluan's night sky, but in all the rest of the cosmos. Stars he had grown up watching, stars he had loved long before he had even known was love was, stars that had called to him and stars that felt like the place he belonged.

But his was a spacefaring race. They had earned that right over countless generations of dreaming, and he had been born into it. At no point in known history had any kindly spacefarers stepped in and scooped up the people who wanted to leave the planet and taken them into the stars. If they had, humanity would never have made it to the stars at all.

This truth went to the heart of General Order 1. Every species was supposed to make their way to stars in their own time. This went to the core of what the Federation was. The goal was not to swallow all worlds into a force of galactic order, but to let every world, every species, be what it desired for itself. To choose its own destiny.

Implicit in it was a cruelty. Because Lorca had been born in an era with space travel, he did not know the ache and anguish of all those who had lived before him and dreamed of doing the very thing he took for granted as a part of his birthright. He would never know what it was to sit surrounded by the rest of your species and want something, to see it was possible, and know that you would never see it in your lifetime.

Lalana had been alive longer than humanity had possessed flight. Her lifetime had encompassed that of Leonardo da Vinci. In those years, humanity had gone from earthbound to heavenly explorers, and Lalana's people had not. Given who they were, given how they felt about technology, she might live another eight hundred years or even eighty thousand like Umale and never set foot on another planet again.

And yet, despite those odds and circumstances, she had done it. She had found a way to see the worlds she dreamed of—dreams he knew himself—and then he had taken her right back to her homeworld and destroyed her only mechanism of escaping it again.

"Why didn't you tell me this before?"

He fur was smoothing, returning to normal. "Your face. It was so happy when you said you would save my people. I could not take that from you. I wanted you to be the person you wanted to be. So please, help me be who I want? I do not care where you take me, so long as it is somewhere I can see the stars."


	25. Conflicting Reports

A/N: You might be able to identify the first set of visitors to Luluan with good detective work based on the details revealed in this chapter. Also, if you happen to catch the resemblance to a certain other Swedish character... yes, it is intentional! I couldn't resist throwing in a little homage to one of my favorite literary characters.

If you'd like to skip past all the alien investigation content because worldbuilding isn't your bag and you just want to get to the character stuff, last scene is a Cornwell one I'm particularly fond of. (And another scene that was written months ago. So glad to finally be able to post it!)

* * *

For once, as it flew between the stars, the Triton was abuzz with activity.

After leaving Luluan, both the Triton and the Calgary set a course for Vega, where the two ships offloaded their complement of enterprising criminals and the Gentonian ship was impounded. Assuming Egarell did not sell the ship to finance some form of legal defense, there the Gentonian ship would remain until Egarell or one of his cohorts secured their freedom by verdict or time served.

The Triton did not hang around to discover which. The moment the last prisoner was offloaded, they set a new course at maximum speed for Risa.

There was no real need for urgency. The Starway offices on Risa had already been raided and Beldehen Venel and several others taken into custody. The facilities on Risa were perfectly adequate to the task of detaining the offenders, but the Risian authorities did not like impounding off-worlders because it went counter to their image as an idyllic vacation spot. The decision was made to move Venel and the others to the facility on Vega. Lorca immediately volunteered the Triton for this duty.

Assuming they continued at max speed, they would be at Risa in a couple of days. If the ship's engines ended up needing a day or three to recover from the strain of such a taxing flight as a result, so be it. The Triton was an old ship on the verge of being decommissioned. It could hardly be expected to turn back around too quickly, and Lorca felt the crew had earned a bit of vacation.

Even if they had not, they were certainly earning it now. Every department was working overtime. Between their sensors and the Calgary's, they had amassed a veritable treasure trove of data about Luluan, and it took time to sift through and analyze it all.

And then there was Lalana. He might have dropped her on Vega, but Risa seemed the better choice. It was just as much a travel hub, this afforded her more time to assist with their investigative endeavors, and Risa was, by its own admission, a paradise. What better introduction to the wonders of the Federation?

Sitting in the captain's chair, he reviewed the latest updates Arzo had made to the report on Luluan's planetary properties. The scans had turned up some interesting things. He was thoroughly engrossed to the point where if he had been doing his usual pacing, he probably would have tripped over Carver's navigation console.

Of all the things he had expected to read about Luluan, dead last was that the planet showed signs of terraforming on a massive and advanced scale. Its orbit was perfect. Artificially perfect. It deviated with such slightness from perfection that it had no seasons.

And then there was the star. One of the first things Benford had said upon Lorca's return was that without that enhanced beacon, they never would have found Luluan. The red star was in a particularly dense spot of the Briar Patch, and like the sun on a cloud-covered day, was visible only from a few directions through gaps in the clouds. How anyone had found it in the first place, they did not know. Probably completely by accident.

As for why these invaders had tried so hard to colonize the planet, Arzo had a strong theory. Luluan was a veritable hotbed of geothermal potential. The planet radiated heat. Its little red sun accounted for only part of the surface temperature. The fact that it was not also racked by massive seismic disturbances was apparently a further result of the terraforming. The structure of its internal ocean seemed to regulate the planet's internal pressure. Again, terraforming.

The task of identifying Luluan's first invaders initially fell to Larsson. In this regard, Lalana was not very helpful. "Hla-pu," she identified them, which did not match anything on file, and she reported they looked much like humans but with very advanced technology, which also did not help. A lot of species in the quadrant shared the same basic structure and features as humans. Given the timeline, it definitely wasn't humans unless secretly some aliens really had been scooping them up in centuries past. Larsson gave up on the search almost immediately. "What do I look like, a detective?" he grunted.

"You look like an officer on my ship," said Lorca. "But if this is too hard a task for you..." He hoped a small dig at Larsson's capabilities would inspire the lieutenant to try harder.

It did not. Larsson made a small humming noise and shrugged his shoulders almost imperceptibly. He failed to see any point in wasting his time when it might be better spent elsewhere. "It is too hard. I want to focus on history."

Lorca gave the task to Kerrigan, who tackled it with great enthusiasm, hopeless as it seemed.

The other impossible task was Umale's box. Arzo speculated it might be a data storage device because it had a localized energy field that seemed to contain data in it, but he could not ascertain what the data was or if the data even related to the box's primary function. It would have to be transferred to a research station for further evaluation.

There were some facts that could finally be established. They had located the comet used to track cycles on Luluan, and the length of the planet's days, and were able to confirm with complete and total accuracy that the lului day was thirty-five hours long and a comet cycle was one hundred and twenty-one Earth years, so Lalana was nine hundred and forty-four years old, and Umale was coming up on a hundred thousand.

Which was entirely an exception and not a rule, because when lului bred, it killed them.

It wasn't death quite the way humans knew it and the lului did not view it as such. It was more of a recycling. When the comet arrived, the lului gathered into various masses on the yellow grasslands of the planet (these grasslands seemed to be designated meeting areas) and essentially turned themselves into cellular mush. Something happened involving the non-differentiated organs being taken apart and triggered into a gestative or regenerative state, like starfish, so that new structures were grown at the expense of the old ones. The result was, however many lului entered the breeding mass, more came out, slightly smaller than before. After gorging on worms farmed from underwater, they soon regained standard mass. The guess was that Umale's smaller size was somehow related to this.

It was a perfect method of population control, but it had clear drawbacks. Each "Great Merge" was capable of increasing the population by about twenty percent. The fact that there were four hundred and eighty-seven million lului currently on the planet reflected the fact that seventy percent of the lului had been wiped out by the initial contact with off-worlders, and four eighty-seven was what the lului had managed to recoup in the time since.

It also put something into clear, stark perspective for Lorca: lului were accustomed to choosing the exact time and circumstance of their own death. It really was crucial to them, and if they felt death was preferable to their current or future situation, then they had no qualms about it. Thus Lalaran. Thus, too, Lalana in his ready room.

Russo's voice interrupted Lorca's reading. "Captain, your presence is being requested in sickbay."

The words "requested in sickbay" rarely meant anything good. "Is it an emergency?"

Russo repeated the question to whoever was on the other side of the line and reported, "No, but Dr. Ek'Ez would like to speak with you as soon as possible. He says it's important."

 _Too important to wait for the latest draft of the medical report?_ Lorca sighed and vacated the captain's chair. He had been sitting a lot longer than he realized and felt stiff all over. This would be a good chance to stretch his legs, then. "Carver, you have the conn."

* * *

Ek'Ez and Li were waiting for him, Li looking grim as ever, and Ek'Ez looking... like something. Lorca had yet to fully unlock the nuances of Kakravite expressions, which were varied, usually had something to do with eye movements, and rarely corresponded to what humans expected them to. Instead, he had to rely on Ek'Ez's tone of voice, which turned out to be excited.

"Captain, Dr. Li has discovered the most amazing thing!"

"What's that?" asked Lorca, crossing his arms and preparing himself for a long explanation before Ek'Ez actually revealed the point.

"We have sequenced Lalana's genome and Dr. Li has found a match! Not a full match, you understand, a partial one, but it gives rise to the most incredible possibilities, and it was more of a match than we ever expected to find. And it was only due to Dr. Li's illustrious ancestor that we were able to make the match at all."

Lorca glanced at Li, wondering what that meant, and if Li's ego really needed the boost she was clearly getting from this roundabout revelation.

"First, let me preface this by saying—" (There it was, the beginning of the real preamble. Lorca tried not to look too bored.) "—it has been extremely difficult to sequence Lalana's genome because, as you will recall, her cells degrade incredibly quickly when removed from the host biomatrix. Assembling even the three percent of the genome we have took thousands upon thousands of cells, each cell providing us with but a small piece of the whole before it turned into, as you humans might say, 'soup.' We had to painstakingly piece together these snippets in order to uncover longer chains of bases. And may I say, it was very gracious of Lalana to provide us these cells, given the cost to her, and I have now suspended any further sequencing."

"Cost?" prompted Lorca.

"As you may recall, the undifferentiated nature of her cells means that each of her cells functions as neural tissue."

Lorca realized what Ek'Ez was saying without needing any further explanation, but was shocked enough that he said nothing, meaning Ek'Ez continued with his usual level of medical explanation for morons.

"Every time we harvest any amount of Lalana's cells, we run the risk of removing her memories, disrupting motor functions, essentially harvesting active brain tissue. While Lalana assures us she has plenty of cells, and cells do naturally replenish themselves over time, the implications of removing material from someone's brain for frivolous research purposes goes against the practices of ethical medicine."

"It's not frivolous," said Li suddenly. "We got a match. We might get even more if we finish the sequence."

"Yes, but the cost," said Ek'Ez lightly, generally unperturbed by his colleague's apparent lack of ethics. "I do not think that the benefits will justify it if we continue. The information we have gleaned is more than enough."

Lorca's voice was like ice. "What information."

"Based on what we have sequenced, Starfleet has encountered a species which shares several strong genetic similarities to lului. When you consider some of Lalana's attributes, it actually makes perfect sense. Her ability to change color, the control she has of her dermal filaments, the compound pupils—"

"Dr. Ek'Ez!" barked Lorca.

Ek'Ez's eyes blinked one after the other. "The Suliban, sir. Her code provided a match to the Suliban."

Lorca froze. He opened his mouth to speak, but it took a moment to get the word out. "...Suliban?"

"More specifically, sir, the Suliban belonging to the Cabal," said Li. "My uncle encountered them on the Enterprise and described green eyes with multiple pupils. That's how I knew to ask Starfleet for the code. It wasn't in the public database."

The Suliban had risen to infamy during the early days of Starfleet when the genetically-modified soldiers of the Suliban Cabal had infiltrated various governments and organizations, threatening stability across the known galaxy. Starfleet had been among their targets. Even now, a hundred years later, the Suliban were still viewed with suspicion by some.

Lorca looked at Ek'Ez. For once he wanted to hear everything the doctor had to say.

Ek'Ez was uncharacteristically silent. "Well?" prompted Lorca expectantly.

Ek'Ez struggled to think of something to say. "It would stand to reason that whoever modified the Suliban possessed tremendous genetic technology. They were able to splice lului genes into the Suliban code, whereas we are barely able to sequence it."

"So they had a lului?" said Lorca.

"I should think so. It is interesting, of course, that they were able to splice these codes together at all. Lului cells are so unlike the cells of most species. It makes me wonder if there isn't some connection between lului and Suliban."

"Which I could confirm if I sequence the rest of the genome," said Li.

"I am not comfortable with further cell harvesting, we have harvested too much already. Absent a medical need, we cannot dissect a patient's brain while they are using it, even if they agree to the procedure," said Ek'Ez, finally displaying what Lorca felt to be a reasonable level of frustration with Li.

"What am I supposed to do with this information?" asked Lorca.

"I was hoping you would tell me what to do with it," said Ek'Ez. "Because of its potentially classified nature, do I put this in my report?"

* * *

Lorca left sickbay and resolved never to go back in there if he could help it. He stepped into the turbolift.

Sickbay came to him, in the form of Dr. Li running to catch up. "Sir!"

He put a hand out, holding the turbolift doors. "Yes, doctor?"

She did not step into the turbolift, merely stood in the hall addressing him. "This connection to the Suliban Cabal is too important to let it languish as some footnote in a medical report. Give me permission to continue extracting genetic data from Lalana so I can complete the analysis."

"You heard Ek. It's unethical."

Li pondered that, pouting. "She said she'd be willing to help me. I'm sure we can keep any damage to a minimum."

If there was one thing Lalana's many missteps had made clear, it was that she did not fully understand or appreciate her own limitations. "I'm sure you believe that, and I'm sure Lalana does, but she doesn't always know what's best. Dr. Ek'Ez is the senior medical officer on board this ship, and what he says, goes."

"Yes, but—"

"Look, Samaritan, I want to know more about this connection, just like you do. But there are some lines we in Starfleet cannot cross. The Suliban Cabal were active a hundred years ago. You're telling me you think you're gonna get some actionable intelligence on a hundred-year-old group of terrorists?"

Li stared down at her feet. There were things the captain did not know about the Cabal, things that she was not supposed to know, and she could not tell him why it was so important because doing so would jeopardize the thing she valued most in the world. She swallowed, knowing she was making a mistake, but she had to try all the same. The legacy of her family was at stake. "Just let me harvest a few more cells before we get to Risa. It'll be worth the cost. Whatever the cost is."

"You don't get to decide that," said Lorca flatly, removing his hand from the door. The turbolift slid shut.

It had been obvious from the get-go that Li did not view Lalana as an equal. No matter what Lalana said, did, or was, Li seemed to look at the lului and see an animal that could have beneficial research applications, not a patient, and certainly not a person. Lorca himself had made enough mistakes trying to use Lalana to his advantage. There was no way he was going to let Li repeat that.

But still, Suliban Cabal? Even now, a hundred years on, there were still rumors of more to that chapter of history than the official record provided. Umale had known about the Federation. Did that mean there was another secret to the lului?

The doors opened on the bridge and Lorca immediately swung left to his ready room, proceeded into the bathroom, and vomited into the sink.

* * *

Katrina Cornwell reached over to the bedstand and pawed at the signaling, beeping commlink with the sort of foggy-brained clumsiness that suggested she had just been approaching the threshold of a dream and her brain did not appreciate being pulled out of it. "What," she groaned.

"Incoming from the captain of the Triton."

Her eyes fluttered. She answered the comm tech, but not clearly enough for him to understand her. "Put it through!" she repeated, sitting up and rubbing her eyes.

"Ah, I'm sorry, Kat, I didn't mean to wake you!"

There were two key reasons she knew that was a lie. First, he was meticulous about time, particularly when it came to San Francisco. Second, the comm tech would not have put him through unless he insisted it was important, which meant he knew he would wake her, and that waking her had been an entirely intentional part of his agenda.

She staggered over to her desk, feeling her way along in the dim light from the commlink. "It's the middle of the night, Gabriel. Why are you calling?" She recognized the look in his eyes. A thought tugged at her half-awake mind. "Did you think I would be naked?"

He feigned innocence. Badly. "I mean..." He knew her well enough to realize it wasn't wholly out of the realm of possibility.

 _Oh my god_ , she thought, sitting down with a sigh. He'd been hoping she was. Thankfully she'd gone to sleep in a tank top and shorts. She checked the time. 23:35. They were scheduled to discuss his full mission reports in seven and a half hours. "What couldn't wait until the morning?"

"About that..."

She sensed instinctively what was coming and gave him a look that said, _You wouldn't dare_.

He would, of course. "We've gotten a little off-schedule getting these reports ready for the admiral. Since I've been up for the last eighteen hours..."

And she had been asleep for the last hour and a half. "You want me to do the presentation for you."

"Honestly, Katrina, these reports speak for themselves."

She rubbed her eyes. He had done this same thing to her several times over the years, ever since their time at the Academy. One night before a presentation, he called her, fake-coughed and said he felt like he was coming down with something so he might not be able to make it, and to go on without him if so.

At the time, she couldn't figure out why. He liked presentations. He was great at them. He had a natural reservoir of confidence and charisma that usually inspired the people around him to follow his lead.

Turned out he'd been invited to a senior cadet function the night before. To further sell the lie, when she called to check on him in the morning, he actually had been in the infirmary with what she later found out was a massive, massive hangover.

As for why he was doing this now, there would be a reason, a real reason, probably even a halfway-decent one, but over the years she had come to understand that at its core, this was about control. He liked to dictate the terms of his engagements. He probably wasn't even doing this to her consciously.

Sensing she was not entirely convinced, he said, "I promise I'll make it up to you..." He had made it up to her back at the Academy, too. Easily one of the best nights they had ever had together. Guilt was a powerful motivator.

"All right. Give me the highlights." She had long since given up telling him this was going to be the last time. There was no point in lying to him, or to herself.

He launched into an overview of what the strongest areas of the reports were, and where there were weaknesses to avoid. She recorded this information so she didn't have to listen too intently. "The history of the Lului is where this really shines. Now that we have more time with Lalana—"

Even half-asleep, she caught it. "Wait, what? What do you mean, more time?"

"Didn't I mention that? We're just giving her a lift to Risa."

There it was. That was the reason he didn't want to make the presentation. He knew, quite correctly, that this would not go down well with the Admiral, and he didn't feel like dealing directly with the fallout. Not when he could use Cornwell to mitigate the damage. Bad news always sounded best coming from a familiar voice.

Though the circumstances of Starfleet's encounter with the lului had certainly been unique, officially, they had been added to the list of Protected Worlds and Races, with a strict Non-Interference order. The hope was that, in time, Luluan would return to its natural, pre-interference state. (Since Cornwell had not read the reports yet, she did not yet know exactly how ludicrous an aim this was.) Transporting a member of the species off the planet was expressly counter to the protection order.

"You kept her. You _kept the lului_." Cornwell covered her face with her hands. When her hands fell away, they revealed an expression of intensely annoyed revelation. "Of course you did. She's a massive boost to your ego!" Maybe if it weren't the middle of the night for her she would have been kinder or less honest, but it was, so she wasn't.

"Not everything I do is about my ego!" he exclaimed, immediately incensed.

"Gabriel." She stretched his name out into three judgmental syllables. There was nothing he hated quite like being called out, especially when whatever he was being called out for contained some kernel of the truth.

He sighed in annoyance and defeat. "Look, she was going to kill herself if I left her on the planet. Tried to do it right here in my ready room."

Again, Cornwell was flabbergasted. "What?"

"Started smashing her head on the floor. But it's fine now. I took care of it. Anyway. Have you got the reports?"

"Back up. We need to talk about the fact your alien tried to kill itself. In front of you."

Lorca was a little tired of hearing Lalana described as "his" alien. "As much as I'd love to go twelve rounds of mano a mano psychoanalysis with you right now, it _is_ late there, and I'd like to get some sleep, as I'm sure you would. So if you can confirm you've received the files..."

She glanced over at the desk console. "Seven reports, totaling... two hundred and ninety thousand words!?" The medical and history files were lengthy, as they should be, but his command report alone was almost sixty. There was no way she was going to be able to read it to any extent before the briefing. There was also a classified addendum to the medical report which piqued her interest, but was coded above her clearance level. What was that?

"Good, it's all there." There was an air of finality to his voice, as if he felt it time to terminate the call, but Cornwell wasn't done with him.

"I know you like being thorough, but, these aren't reports, these are—what is this? A love letter? A manifesto?"

He cocked his head. "I'll have you know I am perfectly capable of saying 'I love you' in three words."

"Really," said Cornwell flatly, doubting Lorca had the emotional wherewithal to actually mean it if he did say it.

"And I've got plenty of other ways of letting you know I care that aren't nearly as dry and... cerebral as a bunch of reports." He smirked at her suggestively.

It was too late in the goddamn night for this. She fixed him with an angrily tired glare. "I didn't say it was a love letter to me."

"Well it's certainly not a love letter to Admiral Wainwright," he said, snickering at the idea.

While she hadn't read a word of the reports he'd just given her, she had read all of the reports and logs leading up to this set, and she had a good idea of how to push his buttons. "Tell me again why you kept the lului, Gabriel."

His laughter stopped abruptly. He scoffed. "You need sleep more than I do. You understand she's a sort of... monkey, rat... jellyfish thing, right?" He let her process that description a moment. (Her process determined he was trying much too hard to make his description sound unappealing.) "If I have been overly thorough, it's only because I understand the monumental importance of this mission to Starfleet, and I've taken the mantle of this responsibility—"

"Goodnight, Gabriel," she said, and promptly terminated the call. What an idiot he could be. Obviously, his first love was his job. It was written plainly in everything he did. No one—not her, and not some alien—was ever going to change that.

 _God_ , she thought to herself as she crawled back into bed. _I am a world-class enabler._


	26. Right as Rain

The sad truth of it was, Lorca's plan worked. Wainwright was much happier hearing bad news from Cornwell, and when Lorca did check in with Command later in the afternoon, Wainwright was practically bursting with pride that he had signed off a mission that had produced a wealth of information "unlike anything Starfleet has ever encountered!"

What Lorca did not know was that these words were, verbatim, Wainwright's response to almost every successful exploratory mission under his purview. This, though, was sure to be the proverbial feather in the admiral's cap. After a long career in which he had denied so many missions, he could say with full confidence all the ones he had approved were resounding successes with incredible results.

Cornwell was happy, too. Lorca's success reflected well on her for having set it all up in the first place. "Now aren't you glad you recommended me for this posting?" he asked when he followed up with her the next day.

"No bullshit?" said Cornwell, an old signal they used to provide moments of stark honesty. "Your report reads like a manual of what _not_ to do, but no one around here cares because it worked."

Lorca beamed smugly at that. Truly exceptional captains utilized truly exceptional methods. "I still owe you. Why don't you come join us on Risa?"

"Exactly how many days are you planning to have engine trouble?"

"Depends on if you're coming or not."

She sighed. It did sound wonderful. If she left now, she might be able to make it. But there was a pile of work on her desk as a result of this mission, and Wainwright was going to lean on her heavily to process.

He saw the uncertainty. "No pressure. If you don't make it, I'm sure we'll find some other time." These days, those promises were getting harder and harder to keep.

It was also getting harder to stop him avoiding conversations he didn't want to have when the power to do so was a single finger tap away, but he was in a good mood, which greatly increased her odds. "I'm still concerned about Lalana's stability. I noticed you left that detail out of your report?"

He didn't need to ask what detail he'd left out, because it had been entirely intentional. "It's completely resolved itself. She's happy!" Exuberant, even. Benford had been assisting Lalana explore Earth's music history, and every day when Lorca checked on her, she had a new favorite song. Today's was "God Only Knows" by the Beach Boys, which she had played on a loop for two hours. Since the song was just under three minutes long, that amounted to over forty successive plays.

"The fact that she's happy now doesn't necessarily mean anything. Suicidal individuals often experience euphoria after a failed attempt. I think you mentioned it to me because you want me to help."

Lorca considered that. It was a fair point. "She'll talk your ear off on the comm if you let her. But I think you'll find she's fairly alien in how she processes things, so the rules of human psychology may not apply."

"I'm also concerned about you dumping her on a planet without any support network."

"You said you'd get her Federation citizenship." It would afford her the full safeguards and assistance of the Federation's many programs.

"Those wheels are already in motion. That's not the problem. Where will she live? What will she do?"

He shrugged. "Whatever she likes. She's more resourceful than you give her credit for." He was beginning to feel like Cornwell was admonishing him and it made him uncomfortable. "Talk to her. That's what you psychologists like to do. And if you're not convinced, as I am, that Lalana's gonna be just fine..."

Cornwell decided the giant pile of work could wait. "I want a secure channel and two hours completely uninterrupted," she said. "And absolutely no attempt to violate the security and content of our conversation."

"Doctor-patient confidentiality will be stringently observed," he promised. "If that's all, I've got to get back to the bridge."

Cornwell considered him carefully a moment. "Dismissed, captain."

The transmission ended. Captain. It really did have a nice ring to it, no matter what context Cornwell used it in.

* * *

There was nothing that buoyed the spirits of a starship's crew quite like the words "unrestricted shore leave on Risa." Immediately after the announcement, a line had formed to the transported that stretched almost the entire length of the ship. Lorca walked along this long line, returning the smiles and words of appreciation with a little smile and nod of his own. It was good to see the crew in high spirits, but there was one face he was looking for in particular.

He found her three-quarters of the way down the line, the only one who wasn't smiling. She did seem somewhat less grim than usual. "Chief. With me."

Billingsley's response to this was a look of annoyed confusion as she withdrew from the transporter queue and followed Lorca down the hall and past the end of the line.

Her initial instinct was that she was having her leave canceled to stay and do ship maintenance, and that rankled her. Once they were out of earshot, she said, "Captain, I've earned this leave. Lieutenant Marzak and his crew are more than capable—"

There was a glint in Lorca's eye. It was sort of adorable how bad she was at reading people. "There's this villa, overlooking the ocean," he said. "They reserve it for Starfleet bigwigs. Captain Archer stayed there his first time on Risa."

They passed the turbolift. She realized they were walking in a big, senseless circle around the circumference of the ship. He wasn't taking away her leave, he was simply coopting it for his own personal use. "I was going swimming," she responded, shifting the strap of the bag across her shoulder.

"You can practically drop off the balcony into the water," he countered.

She hesitated, picturing that.

"C'mon, Sarah," he drawled, and elbowed her lightly. A crewman with a bag of her own approached down the hall and Billingsley held her tongue until the other woman passed.

"Fine," she said. "But you're buying me dinner after."

Given the post-scarcity status of the economy, that made her a very cheap date.

* * *

It was a beautiful villa. Billingsley stood on the balcony and felt the sea breeze brush against her skin and did not regret coming with him one bit. Risa was a paradise. Even if the gravity was a little lighter than she liked, if she had to be on an Earthlike planet, she preferred this one to the world of humanity's origins. Peaceful. Quiet. A good place to focus.

Returning inside, she found Lorca talking to Benford about something to do with the lului. That damn lului. If she never saw another one in her life it would be a day too soon. She envied the captain a little. While she found all this running around to be a dissatisfying disruption to her engineering work, he seemed to thrive on it, and there was a palpable excitement in his voice as he confirmed arrangements with Benford. "Great," Lorca was saying, "give Cornwell my thanks and let me know when it's done."

"You got it," said Benford, and the call ended.

Lorca looked over at Billingsley, smiling broadly. She felt a pang of annoyance. He had never smiled that like because of her. "I am officially free of duty," he announced, patting the bed. "How about another go?"

She came near enough that he was able to hook her with one arm and toss her onto the bed, but she did not dissolve into the embrace as she might have and instead remained stiff and unyielding. "What?" he asked after a minute of not getting the response he desired.

"You're different with her."

"'Her?'" he echoed. "The only person I'm with right now is you." He meant it in more than the literal sense, because he hardly counted what he had done with Serot on Luluan as anything, and Cornwell wasn't even in the same sector.

When she spoke, she said the name in three, heavily-punctuated syllables of mocking disdain. " _La-la-na_." She also mispronounced the name, as people were wont to do when taking it at face written value. Wainwright hadn't grasped the distinction even after he'd been corrected twice, and Lorca had decided not to press the point with the admiral.

Lorca rolled his eyes and sat up. "Not this again."

"Again?" She sat up, too.

"Is there some rumor on the ship I'm not aware of?"

"Rumor?"

They seemed to be on different tracks of thought. "What are you talking about?"

She explained. "Every time you talk to the lului, or about the lului, or anyone even mentions the lului, you... You smile more. You laugh." She frowned and looked away. "You never laugh with me."

Lorca did laugh then, but a short laugh, more judgmental than joyous. "I'll have you know I laugh all the time, it's just, you don't have any sense of humor." It was half-tease, half-truth. "So, what, you're jealous of Lalana?"

"I didn't say that," Billingsley huffed.

"I like Lalana. She's funny. But she's not the one I invited here," Lorca pointed out.

Billingsley's face furrowed. "How would that even work?"

Lorca chuckled then, and shook his head. "I have no idea. But as for how _this_ works..." He pressed her back down on the bed with a kiss and found her much more reciprocating.

When they were done, they dressed and headed out for dinner. There was a restaurant Yoon had recommended, a real hole in the wall on a side-street off a plaza, but finding it required stopping twice to ask for directions. Billingsley was annoyed. "Why didn't the first person just say to turn after the fountain?" she fumed as they made their way down a street of cobblestone.

There were any number of reasons, thought Lorca. Perhaps they'd forgotten the fountain was there, or simply gotten mixed up as to the location. The locals always tried their best to help visitors, but that didn't mean they had a one hundred percent success rate.

They finally found the restaurant, a little wooden façade set into a shadowy offshoot that felt a lot like an alleyway. There weren't many people around, but opening the door revealed the restaurant was packed. Apparently it was one of the best-known little secrets on Risa.

Getting a table to themselves was impossible, but by some stroke of luck, Yoon and Morita were there as well.

"Captain, please, join us!" said Yoon, signaling the waiter to bring two chairs. This being Risa, additions at the dinner table were a matter of course.

Lorca glanced at Billingsley to see if she wanted to. She was already striding past him to the table. There was really no winning with Billingsley. Even trying to be considerate just ticked her off.

Yoon smiled brightly and Morita stood as Lorca and Billingsley sat down. "The dishes here are just amazing," said Yoon. "I've already ordered a few. I'll add some more to make sure there's enough." She spoke briefly with the waiter, no menu required. "Oh! I hope you don't mind me ordering for us."

"I trust you," said Lorca, speaking from experience.

Yoon beamed and said to Billingsley, "I just love how adventurous the captain is, don't you? Some people are so picky when it comes to strange foods."

Billingsley glanced appraisingly at Lorca, then said to Yoon, "I know, the captain will eat anything."

Lorca's eyes widened. She hadn't just said that. He wanted to kick her under the table, but it would only make things worse if he did. "Do they serve alcohol here?" he said quickly, but Morita's raised eyebrow suggested she'd caught his expression and figured out exactly what Billingsley meant. How Billingsley had said it with a straight face, he didn't know. He liked it better before she had decided to try and have a sense of humor. At least Yoon seemed to have taken the statement at face culinary value.

The food was everything Yoon promised, but unfortunately for Billingsley, the conversation soon turned to Lalana. "I'm so excited for her," said Yoon. "I gave her a whole list of planets to visit with the most unusual foods. She's gonna try everything! And learn to dance. Reiko lined up an instructor here on Risa. Can you imagine? She can spend as much time as she wants on any planet and still have plenty of time to see more. Ah, I'm so jealous!"

Billingsley glowered and picked at her food. Even Yoon, one of her few friends on the ship, clearly preferred the lului's company.

After dinner, they walked back to the villa in the warm night air. Billingsley remained in a foul mood and Lorca did not press her.

In the morning, when she said she wanted to spend the day swimming, Lorca did not try to stop her. Instead, he dressed, went downstairs to the information desk, and asked, "Which way to the offices of the planetary directory?"


	27. Music to the Ears

_A/N: While the music pieces described within are not based on any Earth compositions, if you want some suitably unusual music to accompany your reading, I wrote this section while listening to "Songs from Liquid Days" by Philip Glass. In particular I recommend Changing Opinion, Liquid Days (Part One), and Forgetting for eliciting much of the same emotional intent._

 _Also, I realize this probably merited mentioning last chapter, but Risa is basically my personal gift to Captain Lorca, in light of what's coming. I'm just doing what I can before the darkness._

* * *

Amazingly, not only was she there, surrounded by a fresh backdrop of tropical flowers, she recognized him on approach. "Hello again!" she said, flashing that brilliant smile he still remembered from the first sight of it on the commlink. She was one of three operators present, the other two equally beautiful, but unfamiliar. "I see you've found your way here after all."

"After seeing you, how could I not?" It was a forward thing to say, but to a Risian woman with her looks and her job, saying anything less would have been an insult. He extended his hand across the counter of her desk. "Gabriel Lorca. Captain of the USS Triton."

She returned the handshake. "Sollis."

"Sollis? That's a beautiful name." His eyebrows lifted in honest admiration.

"Isn't it? It's like the word 'solace' in your language."

Recalling Serot of the Shkef, Lorca asked, "What does it mean in yours?"

"It's just a family name. Was there something I could do for you, captain?"

"I just wanted to thank you for your help. I don't know if they told you, but you ended up tangled in a bit of an interplanetary incident."

"Ah, yes, Beldehen Venel. I knew something was up when I heard his name two days in a row." There was a beep from her console. The other two operators were already engaged and she held up her finger and had just enough time to give him a look of apology as she dropped into the familiar greeting. "Warm welcomes from Risa, the most pleasant..." Once the call was directed, she returned her attention to him. "Apologies."

"No need. I'm the one bothering you at work." He grinned lopsidedly.

"It's not a bother in the slightest. I'm glad they stopped Venel, whatever he was doing." A lot of the details of what had happened were not and would never be matters of public record, mostly for the safety of the lului. She leaned forward, highlighting the cut of her dress. "Was there anything else I could do to be of service?"

He leaned against the counter and said casually, "I seem to have found myself with a whole day of nothing planned. I was wondering, what time do you get off work? Are you free later?"

"It just so happens, I'm free right now." She signaled one of the other operators. "Delarith? Hospitality service. Call a sub for me?" The other operator nodded and Sollis emerged from behind her desk.

"That easy?"

When she smiled, it was impossible not to get lost in her eyes. "Here on Risa, we'd hate to promise a fantasy we can't deliver."

* * *

They spent the day touring some of the most beautiful vistas Risa had to offer. Sollis was an adept guide, more than happy to share a few of her personal favorite spots, some of which were almost devoid of tourists. They walked on the beach barefoot, warm water lapping at their toes, and ate fresh fruits picked right from the trees in an orchard. "Your planet is a paradise," he told her as her dress hung on a tree branch, fluttering in the breeze. He wasn't really talking about the planet, but it was true.

"Do you know the best thing about it? On Risa, the rest of the universe comes to you!"

He smiled faintly at that, thinking it sounded terrible. Given the choice between sitting in one planet, in one place, or going out and exploring the unknown, he would always choose the latter. He realized Lalana would, too. That he had almost sent her back to Luluan seemed suddenly unforgivable.

They made their way back to civilization. "Would you like to join my husband and I for dinner?"

On any other planet, he would have been taken aback by that invitation, coupled as it was with the revelation that she was married, but this was Risa. "Certainly."

She chose an open-air café with a seaside sunset view. Birds called in the distance and the sea lapped at the base of the cliffs.

Her husband, Caxus, was a musician with sandy blonde hair and a ready laugh. He insisted on a full accounting of their adventures, not because he was jealous, but because he seemed to genuinely enjoy knowing they'd had a good time. "Sollis is wonderful, isn't she?" he asked, putting his hand lovingly on hers.

"She certainly is," agreed Lorca. The best feature of Risa was not its weather, architecture, or beaches. It was its people.

They discussed the role of starship captain as they ate, the worlds he had seen, the weight of responsibility. He let slip some of the details of his most recent adventure. Not enough to identify anything about Luluan, but enough to share some of the amazement he felt at having been privy to it.

As the sun dipped below the horizon, the café came alive with hundreds of tiny, multicolored lanterns. A group of musicians began to play, close enough to enjoy the music, but not so close as to be overwhelmed by it.

"There's a performance I was going to tomorrow," said Caxus when Lorca commented on the music. "If you don't have any plans, you should join us. The artist is a visiting Terellian. He's supposed to be one of the greatest musicians in two quadrants, and the instrument he plays is exceeding difficult to master."

"Yes, you must come," said Sollis. "It's a once in a lifetime opportunity. We would be terrible hosts if we didn't insist."

This was certainly true if you only ever stayed on your homeworld, but Lorca agreed, because it was equally unlikely the opportunity would arise again while he was running errands and exploring unknown regions for Starfleet. As Lalana might say, the fact that you met any single individual in the universe was an impossible miracle.

Sollis and Caxus bade him goodnight at the entrance to the villa. When he arrived upstairs, he found Billingsley already asleep in bed. Her hair smelled of sea salt.

* * *

He invited Billingsley because it seemed the polite thing to do, but her response was, "Terellians? They freak me out. They have four arms."

"Why did you join Starfleet?" he wondered aloud again.

"To build starships," was her answer. To each their own. "I'm going swimming." The resistance of the water reminded her of higher gravity.

It was secretly a relief. Most anyone else made better company than Billingsley, and there was one person he knew would enjoy this concert more than anyone.

He met Sollis and Caxus in the plaza outside the venue. "Ready to head in?" asked Caxus.

"Actually, I hope you don't mind, I invited—"

"Hayliel!"

Lalana came running towards him with bounding leaps that drew several looks of amazement from onlookers, but what struck Lorca was the fact that she was now wearing _clothing_. It wasn't much—a sort of loose blue scarf draped around her—but it served the same function. She had her own personal translation device and communicator now, hung around her neck on a black cord as the Triton-issued one had been.

She bounded to a stop directly in front of him and pressed against his hip in greeting. "This is the most amazing planet! Do you know they have paintings which are made on top of surfaces with pigments suspended in solid form so that they are permanent? Permanent paintings! And they collect them in a place called a museum."

So lului did have paintings of some sort. He laughed and wondered what form they took. "Caxus, Sollis, this is Lalana."

"It is a great pleasure to meet you. I have not heard much music yet, but Gabriel says this is music of a very rare kind, and that you can only hear it once. All the music I know so far can be heard many, many times over."

The Risians seemed uncertain how to greet Lalana given the difference in bodily configuration, so Sollis gave a small curtsy and Caxus bowed slightly.

"Remember the ground rules," said Lorca. "I don't care how excited you get, absolutely no talking, vibrating, or jumping."

"Nn, I promise. I have already made enough mistakes today. Apparently you are not allowed to lick the paintings. They almost made me leave the museum, but I apologized very sincerely and they let me stay. There are so many things you are not supposed to lick. Margeh and T'rond'n never minded if I licked anything, but apparently this is less acceptable in the rest of the galaxy."

"Because lului use their tongues to experience the world," said Sollis, remembering what Lorca had said the night before. She offered Lalana her hand. "You are welcome to lick me if you like."

Lalana accepted and then declared, "You taste very kind!" Sollis beamed in appreciation at the compliment.

Lorca was not done issuing his warnings. "And remember, there will be a lot of people in there."

"That is fine. I do not mind."

Lorca did a double-take. "You told me you hate crowds."

"Nn, I said that so you would let me stay in your ready room."

He let out a groan of ardent exasperation. "Lalana!"

She clicked her tongue mirthfully. "Well it worked, didn't it? And that is one of my favorite memories of the Triton!"

The hall was modest in size and already half-full. They found seats just a little to the left of the middle, about halfway up. Lalana happily chatted with Caxus and Sollis about her world, and theirs, and basically anything that popped into her mind. Lorca read the program handout, which contained a small blurb about the musician himself, and five pages of description and diagrams about his instrument.

It was called a quellibell. In some ways, it was similar to a theremin: hand movements in the air controlled pitch and tone, but there the resemblance ended. There was no actual device around which the player's hands moved. Rather, the various sounds were produced by relative position of the player's fingers. The instrument itself was a series of clips connected to the player's fingers. By folding and flicking the fingers, multiple instrument sounds could be played by a single hand, so depending on the number of fingers and dexterity of the player, a single musician could produce the sound of an entire orchestra. Lorca managed to get to the last paragraph of the program as the lights went down and the Terellian appeared onstage.

Four arms, five fingers apiece. Twenty quellibell clips in total. The entire music hall fell into a hushed silence as the Terellian began to play.

The sounds ranged from a fluttering flute to a low, booming horn, and many others that had no proper Earth equivalent. The Terellian wove the sounds together with incredible skill, weaving an audio tapestry. One of the clips even produced a sound akin to a soaring female vocal, and by carefully tracking the movements of the Terellian's fingers, Lorca was able to pick out which.

Lalana's tail curled around his arm. He looked over and noticed her very quietly spinning her hands in delight.

The first piece was a sweet enticement of little strings of notes that overlapped and ran together, like the pitter-patter of rain, intermingled with the vocal sound, which wove in and out of the lighter notes like an eel. It was very quick and very clever. The speed with which the Terellian produced the notes was astonishing.

The second was a bold, sweeping burst of exuberance that rumbled and reminded Lorca of an oncoming storm. It had a sense of adventure, of danger, and victory. While the first piece had mostly entailed tiny, precise finger movements, this one entailed much larger movements of the arms.

The third piece was unlike the first two. Slow and haunting, the tones hung in the air, suspended, lingering. The notes trembled and shook right down to the bone. Then it burst into an explosion of dramatic, frantic need that felt like being knocked over and left Lorca breathless in awe. When the last, final notes sounded, the lights came up, and the room erupted into applause. Lorca stood, glad the standing ovation had been exported to Risa, and the Terellian responded to this thunderous appreciation by bowing so low his head almost swept the floor.

"So what did you think?" he asked Lalana as they made their way out amid the throng of people.

"It was tremendous, but, it makes me sad. A music you can only hear once."

"We can get you a recording," said Caxus. "It's just never the same as hearing it live."

This made Lalana very delighted.

Caxus and Sollis invited Lorca and Lalana to join them for another dinner, but Lalana deferred. "I have already promised my friends Da Hee and Reiko that I would eat with them. But thank you very much for your invitation! I will dine with you tomorrow if that is acceptable."

"We look forward to it!"

This time, Caxus and Sollis took Lorca to a more refined establishment, where the portions were small works of art and featured the finest in cooking techniques from across a dozen worlds. It was an excellent setting to discuss the finer technical details of the quellibell performance. Caxus was familiar with a number of musical terms and techniques that gave Lorca a new level of appreciation for the performance. Under the tablecloth, Sollis slipped off her shoes and teased his leg with her bare foot.

As they ate a dessert of Ktarian pudding and chocolate puffs, Sollis said, "We will completely understand if you decline, and we hope asking doesn't make you uncomfortable, but, we were wondering if you'd like to stay the night with us?"

Lorca paused with a spoon of chocolate two inches from his mouth and looked between them just to be sure he was hearing correctly that this was an invitation from both of them. He put the spoon in his mouth and savored the chocolate a moment. He swallowed, took a breath, and said, "I'd be delighted."


	28. As Far as Goodbyes Go

Sollis roused him with an insistent shake. "Gabriel. Wake up. There is someone here for you." He made a sound midway between a grunt and a hum and exhaled. Sollis held something out in her hand to him. She was wearing a silken robe decorated with flowers native to Risa, the sort you could get in tourist shops. "You left your communicator downstairs. They were calling and we didn't hear it."

Lorca sat upright in alarm. Caxus offered him his pants and shirt. Lorca quickly began to dress. "Who is it?"

"A woman. From Starfleet. She didn't give her name."

Lorca ran a hand through his hair. Sollis grabbed a brush and gave it a quick bit of attention for him while Caxus fixed the collar of Lorca's shirt. A woman from Starfleet. Billingsley?

"Other way," Sollis corrected him as he exited the bedroom. In his defense, he had been entirely and thoroughly distracted when they'd made their way upstairs the night before.

He descended the stairs rapidly until he saw who it was. Then he froze.

Cornwell stared at him. Neither said a word. Cornwell watched in silence as for ten seconds his facial expression shifted between shock, momentary panic, cringing discomfort, a tremendously overwrought wince, a mildly apologetic silent plea, sheepishness, and finally inevitable acceptance. Only then did he make his way down the remaining stairs.

Sollis followed him down. "Can I get you some tea?" she offered.

"We won't be—"

"Yes," said Lorca, in a tone that invited no objection. Sollis immediately moved to the kitchen and Lorca found his socks and boots next to the couch. He sat on the couch as he pulled them on. "In my defense, I thought you weren't coming."

There was a sound from upstairs, indicating Caxus's presence. "I can tell," Cornwell deadpanned. She tilted her head and frowned at him. "Enjoying yourself?" He bit his lip rather than answer.

Sollis came in with a tray of tea and left it on the table. "I'll be upstairs if you need me."

Lorca crossed his arms and leaned back against the couch, refusing to be shamed for who he was. Cornwell sat down on the couch opposite, crossed her legs, and took one of the mugs of tea. She blew across the surface of the water.

This was less a dance of long-time partners and more a blatant display of power. Cornwell was in her uniform, which suggested her purpose was not personal, and except for his demand for tea to keep them here (purely as a precaution in case she had come for the purposes of yelling), she was in charge. He waited for her to break the silence. After a minute, he reached for the other mug, and it was then she spoke.

"To be clear, I'm here in an official capacity."

He paused. "Understood." His fingers closed on the handle and he took a sip. It was a little more floral than he liked, but at this point, he had no one to blame but himself for that.

"Admiral Wainwright thought, and I agreed, that I should come and make sure your lului was adapting as well as you thought."

"And the verdict?"

Cornwell turned the mug around in her hands. "I only just arrived. I thought I'd check in with you first. When you didn't answer your communicator..."

"Ah." Lorca took a sip of the tea and then put the mug down with no intention of finishing it. At least the intent had been friendly. "I'm at your disposal, Commodore."

Caxus's voice came from upstairs. "Captain? We're coming down."

Cornwell raised an eyebrow.

Caxus and Sollis descended. "Don't mind us," said Caxus. "We're just heading out for breakfast."

"Thank you for the tea," said Cornwell, lifting the mug in appreciation.

As soon as they were out the door, Cornwell took a deep breath and closed her eyes. Then she started to laugh, shaking her head as she did. "You are absolutely incorrigible," she laughed. "Of all the things." She continued chuckling and drank some more tea.

Lorca looked at the ceiling. "So glad I could amuse. I take it this means anything else is off the table?"

Cornwell's eyebrows lifted in a momentary burst of further amusement and absolutely everything in her body language confirmed this was a complete and utter no from her. "Mission status report, captain."

* * *

Lorca escorted Cornwell to Lalana, who turned out to be with Yoon and Morita at a nearby resort. They were standing in a line waiting expectantly in the lobby as Lorca and Cornwell approached. Lalana was holding Yoon's hand. If he was Lalana's favorite human, he guessed Yoon was her second-favorite.

"It's great to finally meet you in person," said Cornwell, starting to crouch down. Lalana released Yoon's hand and stretched up, taking hold of Yoon's upper arm instead. It could have been a move designed for Cornwell's convenience, or an indication that Cornwell's movement had made Lalana uncomfortable, based on the way Lalana's tail was twitching.

"Yes, it is nice to also meet you," said Lalana cautiously.

As per Cornwell's demands, Lalana had spoken with Cornwell for over two hours aboard the Triton, but whatever the content of their conversation, it did not seem to have endeared Cornwell to the lului. Lorca wondered why that was. He attempted to bridge the divide. "Commodore Cornwell's going to be taking over from here, making sure you're set up with everything you need."

"Don't think of this as a formal assessment, more a friendly check-up," promised Cornwell with a smile. "Why don't we take a walk?"

When Yoon did not immediately move, Lalana looked at her friend in confusion. "She means without us," said Yoon softly.

"Will we be back before dinner?" asked Lalana.

"Honestly, it could be a while," said Cornwell.

"But we'll—" Yoon swallowed. "We'll see her again?" Morita put a hand on Yoon's back in support.

Cornwell realized they thought she was taking Lalana away in a permanent sense. "I'm more here to observe and assess," said Cornwell. "If you want to spend more time together after I've completed my initial interview, I won't stand in the way." Yoon looked very happily relieved.

Lorca spoke. "I have to get back up to the Triton, so..." Cornwell had decided to cash in her favor by having Lorca handle a pile of her paperwork. "I guess this is goodbye for me."

Lalana's tail stopped twitching. "Really?"

"Afraid so."

Cornwell shifted back slightly to observe Lalana and Lorca. This was, just as much as anything, a crucial part of her assessment.

Lalana took a short step forward, the most she could manage with her legs extended so far, and Yoon moved obligingly closer to Lorca. "Captain," began Lalana, "I know I have said this many times, but I must thank you for everything you have done for me and my people. It has been an absolute joy meeting you and your crew. Everyone I have met has been extremely generous to me, even Kerrigan."

Lorca started laughing, to Cornwell's considerable confusion. He stopped as Lalana continued, "But most of all, you have risked a great deal to help me, and this I will never forget as long as I live. You are an amazing human, an absolute credit to your species. Starfleet is very lucky to have you and I was very lucky it was your ship that heard me. I do not think anyone else could have done what you did and succeeded. I will always, for as long as I live, consider you my friend."

His face scrunched up as he felt his eyes water. He wasn't typically sentimental, but it was hard not to be moved by her earnestness. It didn't help that tears were streaming down Yoon's face, eliciting a sympathetic reaction.

"Come here," he said, offering his arm so Yoon could have a break from acting as Lalana's literal support. (Lalana was almost the same height as Yoon when standing, and Yoon was beginning to look a little wobbly with emotion.) "I'm so glad we got the chance to help you. It's been an absolute blast."

Lalana bounced slightly with excitement as she remembered something. "My favorite part was the boom!"

"Ha!" he went, remembering that very first day on the Triton. "Mine, too!" Her tongue clicked.

He stretched his other arm out in offer and she pressed forward against his chest for a small hug. He tilted his head down and said quietly no one else could make out his words, "I understand running to the stars. It's all I've ever wanted, too." He released her, and she withdrew to her usual height.

"It has been a pleasure, captain."

"Right then," he said, and opened his communicator. "One to beam up."

Cornwell watched Lorca depart with newfound respect for him, despite his flair for a dramatic exit. She could say with confidence now that not only had his judgment not been compromised (at least where his command was concerned—jury was still out on his personal life), he had left an enduring positive impression on both his alien guest and, clearly, his crew.

Cornwell smiled at Lalana. She was pleased for Lorca, truly. "Lalana, if you'll come with me?"

The lului took a moment to receive hugs from Yoon and Morita, picked up a small bag that apparently contained her belongings, and stepped towards Cornwell. Much of the tension from earlier seemed alleviated by the joy of her farewell to Captain Lorca.

As Cornwell and Lalana headed out, Lalana cheerfully said, "Captain Lorca is the best, isn't he?"

"I can't disagree with you," said Cornwell, thinking maybe she shouldn't have cashed in her favor for the paperwork after all. Despite everything, she smiled. "So, tell me what you're planning to do next?"

* * *

Sitting on a mostly vacant ship with only Cornwell's busywork for company, Lorca tried not to think too much about what everyone else on the crew was doing right now on the planet below. He'd ended up with more of an adventure on Risa than usual, and that was saying something. It wasn't really a proper trip to Risa unless you got on the wrong side of some commanding officer. At least the officer in this case had been Cornwell. He could tell she had already forgiven him, even if she wasn't going to let him off the hook.

The reports and forms were entirely boring, but Cornwell would know if he pawned them off on an ensign. He resolved himself to finish every bit of the work with all the diligence, excellence, and determination that had earned him his trial posting as captain.

Maybe he had missed out on the opportunity to spend the night with one of his all-time favorite people. Still, when he put the pile of paperwork against the night he'd spent with Sollis and Caxus, there was absolutely no regret in his mind for what he had done.

He smiled. He missed Risa already.

* * *

Life on the Triton returned to the routine. With a brig full of new prisoners for transport, they set out for Vega again.

They were only five hours out of Risa when Cornwell called. Lorca put her on the main monitor on the bridge, but she immediately requested an audience in private instead.

Clearly something was wrong.

"Have you heard from Lalana?" she asked him once he was in his ready room.

"No," he said, "should I have?" A flicker of realization crossed his face at what this meant. In the space of twenty-four hours, Cornwell had lost his alien.

"Can you try and call her? Maybe she'll pick up for you."

He tried Lalana's personal commlink code and found it offline. "No dice. What was the last thing she said to you?"

Cornwell's jaw tightened. "She thanked me for my help and said she'd keep in mind everything we talked about."

"So, she said goodbye."

Cornwell shifted her gaze sideways in annoyance. "Yes, she said goodbye."

Lorca shrugged. "Then, she's gone."

"You're really not worried?" said Cornwell.

"Honestly, I don't know, Kat," said Lorca. "She's a lului. I expect she'll turn up when she wants to."

His lack of concern was truly something. "She might have been kidnapped," pointed out Cornwell. "By one of Venel's associates still on Risa."

"I sincerely doubt that," said Lorca. "I'm pretty sure Lalana's never gone anywhere she didn't want to." Off her planet, into captivity, out of captivity, onto the Triton, into his ready room (where she remained by what he now knew was total subterfuge), into a storage container, off of her planet again. About the only time she had gone somewhere she didn't choose was when his genius plan to implant a transponder inside her had backfired and he'd dropped her in the pond. (Which she had still chosen in a roundabout way by going along with the plan in the first place.)

There was also the point that if she had been kidnapped, it was probably going to be impossible to find her. She could be anywhere, and scanners would never detect her.

"She didn't say anything to you or anyone on the Triton?"

"If she did, I'll let you know," he promised. "But I really wouldn't worry about it, Kat. Lalana is more than capable of seeing things go her way." Lalana was, in her own way, a consummate operator and he was never going to underestimate her again.

He let Cornwell pick his brain for a few more minutes before she finally admitted defeat on figuring out Lalana's location by interrogating him. "Let me know if you hear from her."

"Will do."

Cornwell vanished and Lorca turned and looked out at the stars streaming past. She was out there, somewhere, running as far and as fast towards adventure as she could.


	29. Toil and Trouble

Despite the great success of the mission, there was no call for an old ship like the Triton to do anything besides what it had done before they encountered Lalana, and the crew of the Triton soon found themselves tasked with their usual assignment: transport and patrol. They dropped off the mysterious lului brick (Lorca was starting to think Umale had gifted them with a fancy paperweight as a joke) and Lorca counted the days until the Triton's decommission.

Three months shrank to two and a half. At Spacedock, construction on the new ship was nearing completion. Lorca began to get reports and manuals on its systems. He devoured this reading material with gusto. Seeing the ship's name on the files was always a thrill. The USS Buran. The ship's schematics were beautiful.

As he paced the bridge, he paused at Carver's station to show her the layout of her future console. "What do you think?"

"Is that a tactile response system!?" She looked up at him, wide-eyed.

He grinned. "Schematics are in the computer. Have Hamid come by and relieve you early and you can review them at the end of your shift."

"Thank you, sir!"

The turbolift doors opened, which Lorca look no notice of (this happened roughly a hundred times a day) until there was a nervous, grating cough.

It was Dr. Ek'Ez.

It was rare for Ek'Ez to appear on the bridge. Kakravite eyes did not deal well with the speed at which stars passed by, experiencing a form of motion sickness, so Ek'Ez tended to avoid any locations with windows. Kakravite ships had no windows or viewports, instead navigating solely by ship sensors. Most people tended to find being on them a very claustrophobic experience. There was some real irony in the fact a four-eyed species flew through the cosmos blindly. It also meant Ek'Ez was happy to be assigned quarters on the ship interior, normally seen as undesirable.

"Captain, if I may have a word?"

They went into the ready room and Lorca directed Ek'Ez to stand on the opposite side of the desk where he himself normally stood, expressly so Ek'Ez's back would be facing the window.

"Thank you," said Ek'Ez. "Where should I begin..."

 _At the end_ , thought Lorca, since that would probably cut out all the unnecessary preface of whatever Ek'Ez had come to tell him.

"I have noticed a disturbing pattern in the past two weeks. I have done what I can to determine the nature of this pattern myself, but Dr. Li has been... somewhat less than forthcoming."

"Oh?" Since he had no particular affection for Dr. Li, he already didn't like where this was going.

"It began when I noticed several pieces of equipment had gone missing. Not essential things, mostly backup equipment. I, of course, run a very efficient sickbay. When there are no emergencies or sick crew members, I double check my supplies and backups daily." More information than Lorca needed. "I was able to track down the missing supplies to Dr. Li's quarters. When I attempted to retrieve them, she informed me she was working on a private epidemiology project and apologized for taking the supplies, but her research was in a critical stage and she was unable to return them at present."

Lorca had long suspected Li was secretly going to engineer a supervirus and kill them all. It sounded like she had finally started. He folded his arms and wondered how many hours they had left to live.

"I asked her to share with me the details of her project, and offered my assistance, but she declined. This in and of itself isn't unusual. Dr. Li often has her own experiments running and requires little oversight, but..." Ek'Ez templed his hands together. "She typically performs these experiments within the confines of sickbay, where there are adequate safety precautions in the event of an outbreak, not in her personal quarters."

Two hours, Lorca guessed. They were probably all already infected.

"Then there is also the issue of the nature of the equipment which she took. While most of it does line up with her usual areas of research, some of it... some the equipment she has taken today is equipment designed to treat patients, which is entirely outside the confines of what would be required for research. I fear she may have infected herself with something."

Lorca arms unfolded. That wasn't it. "Shit," he said, and turned and walked back onto the bridge. "Morita! Get... get Larsson and come with me." He turned back and saw Ek'Ez had not moved. "Come on, doctor!"

Morita, Lorca, and Ek'Ez entered the turbolift. "What level are Li's quarters on?"

"Eight."

Larsson met them outside Li's quarters, brandishing a phaser rifle and carrying one for Morita. "What are we walking into?" the Swede asked.

"I hope I'm wrong," was all Lorca said, buzzing the door.

To her credit, Li answered, but the minute she saw who it was, she knew she was screwed. Her face turned white. Lorca advanced on her, driving her into the nearest corner. "Where is she," said Lorca flatly. When Li did not answer, he repeated it much more forcefully, to the point of spraying spittle in Li's face. " _Where is she!_ "

Li collapsed like a jenga tower, knees buckling.

"Sir!" Morita was standing in the entrance to the bathroom. Lorca pushed past her and jerked back with an audible gasp. Moving into a position where he could keep an eye on Li and see into the bathroom, Larsson was equally struck and swore in his native Swedish.

Something was curled up in the bottom of the shower.

Lorca almost tore the shower door off, because while the dusky dark grey-brown shade of the fur was entirely unfamiliar, there was no question that it was Lalana. When he put his hands on her, he felt something else unfamiliar. She was _wet_. He quickly drew his hand back.

There was no panic, only anger. "Ek'Ez, get in here!" The doctor hastened to Lorca's side and looked at Lalana.

The good news was, Dr. Ek'Ez Ak'vek'mov was the galaxy's foremost expert on lului biology. "Oh my," he said. Ek'Ez's eyes blinked and he pondered. He seemed not to find any reason for haste.

"Well don't just stand there, do something!"

"I will prepare a quantity of biomimetic gel," said Ek'Ez, turning to leave. He had devised an entire set of medical procedures based on lelulallen and everything he knew about lului biology, but he had not expected to be able to test his theories so soon.

Lorca's mind raced. "Wait!" Ek'Ez turned back. "Absolutely no one outside of this room finds out about this."

"Captain?"

"No one!" If Cornwell discovered the missing lului had been aboard his ship this whole time, he was never going to get the Buran.

"Yes, captain," said Ek'Ez, sufficiently cowed.

"Morita, find some space somewhere we can put her where no one will check."

"My quarters," she immediately said. "If you're fine with Daisy."

"Good. Larsson, bring her there, don't let anyone see you. And wrap her in something. God help us if she accidentally fuses to your skin."

Larsson looked confused. He had not been privy to that element of the Luluan adventure, largely because Morita and Lorca had omitted it from their reports. Even if lelulallen was perfectly possible with a human, putting any member of the crew out of commission for an unknown length of time would expose the situation.

Lorca was left alone with Li in her quarters.

Li had recovered from her initial collapse and was brushing herself off, seemingly calm now. Lorca stood on the far side of the room from her with his jaw clenched and arms crossed.

She addressed him. "What you have to understand is—"

"No," he said. "You don't get to try and explain this. You are confined to quarters until further notice. No comms, no computer, no anything. Your door does not open unless I say it does. You will sit here and you will think about what you have done and if I decide I want to hear from you, then and only then do you get to talk. Computer, revoke all access for Dr. Samaritan Li. Authorization Lorca-Gamma-Delta-2-5-8."

"Access revoked."

Lorca left and issued a command lock on the door from the hall, even going so far as to override the safety protocols. Even if her quarters were decompressing, Li would now be unable to get out. It felt fair.

In Morita's quarters, Yoon was predictably distraught, Morita wrapping her arms around her wife while Larsson hovered in the room like a fifth leg on a dog. Larsson stiffened to alert when Lorca entered.

They had wrapped Lalana in towels from Li's quarters and laid her on the bed. This was one of those moments Lorca wished Lalana breathed, had a temperature, had a heartbeat, anything to confirm she was alive. He then realized that the simple fact she had not melted into goo was proof enough of her status. That explained why Ek'Ez had not seen the situation as urgent.

He checked on Ek'Ez's ETA. Twenty-five minutes. "Daisy, don't worry," said Lorca. "I promise you she's fine." He explained the nature of lului cell degradation, and while initially the details of cells that fell apart within minutes horrified her, she accepted his assertion that so long as her form was largely intact, there was no imminent danger.

They could be wrong, of course. It could be Lalana really was hanging on by a thread and on the verge of cellular collapse. Lorca didn't think so. Her pupils were wide and dark. He suspected Li had given her something.

Ek'Ez seemed to have reach the same conclusion, calling to request an exemption from the total comms lockout on Li's quarters. Lorca granted it. Five minutes later, Ek'Ez had an update. "Captain, I have determined that Dr. Li has applied a depressant combination in an attempt to place Lalana's cells in a state of suspension which would retard their awareness of separation from the main biomatrix, enabling her to study the lului genetic code more thoroughly."

It was good Ek'Ez had that information, but Lorca was more interested in results. "Can you counteract it?"

"I do not think it wise to attempt to solve this problem with the addition of more chemical or synthetic compounds. They may have unintended results. I believe it would be best for me to continue along my present course of action. If you can please clear an area which is one-point-two meters square..."

The easiest solution turned out to be moving the dinner table, punting it over to the wall and turning it sideways. Then they waited.

Ek'Ez arrived and began to call in a transport. Lorca stopped him. "What part of 'no one outside this room?'" Lorca said.

"Do not be concerned," said Ek'Ez. "I have told my staff and the transporter room that I am assisting Lieutenant Commander Morita and Lieutenant Yoon with a food project. You are not the only crewmember capable of deception, captain. The benefit of a reputation for honesty is that when I am required to lie, it is taken as the truth." It was a mildly frightening revelation because a reputation for genuine honesty was exactly what Ek'Ez had and no one had ever questioned it until now.

A large heated vat appeared. Something about it did not look medical. Lorca realized it had come from the kitchen. "Is that a pot for cooking?"

"Clever, is it not?" said Ek'Ez, completely failing to detect the tone of derision. "Please place Lalana in the pot."

Larsson was the obvious choice again. He hefted Lalana well over the lip of the pot and lowered her inside. She sank into the greenish gel inside. Lorca assisted by tucking her tail in with her.

"Now we simply set to simmer, and we wait!" proclaimed Ek'Ez.

There was a shifting uncertainty in the room. "Exactly how hot are you setting it?" asked Lorca.

"Oh, no, that was... that was an attempt at a joke. It is only set to thirty-five degrees Celsius."

"Never tell a joke ever again," said Lorca. "Stick to medicine."

Ek'Ez seemed to think that was a good opportunity for him to explain what precisely this process of his was. "As you may be aware, lului heal one another using a process known as lelulallen. This is a compound word formed from lallen, which means two lului sitting in such proximity that their fur touches, and lelu, meaning internal. The process uses the living tissues of another creature as a support mechanism to the lului's outer surface so that their inner cells can temporarily disconnect from the internal layer. Not a complete disconnect—more like if you lay a sheet on the ground and lifted it from the middle. The sides remain touching the floor. Because the disconnect is not total, the cells maintain their overall connection to the signal of the biomatrix and do not begin to degrade. Meanwhile, the internal cells liquify and reform in a repaired state."

Lorca went from annoyed at hearing the definition of lelulallen, which he already knew, to fascinated at the realization of what it actually was. (While he had read the entirety of the medical report, that particular section had been awash in medical jargon he had not managed to fully parse.) Finally he understood why Lualen had said it was possible to lelulallen with a human, and why Lualen had said more surface area was required. Lorca stood beside the vat of gel, staring at the dim, dark shape inside. inside.

"It is in fact a variation on the process that lului use to breed; essentially the same mechanism without the totality of reformation which occurs during the mating cycle. What I am attempting to do is trick the outer cells into believing they are in contact with a living creature by submerging them in a gel with properties which mimic living cells. Furthermore, heat provides a more conducive environment for lului, as it is their natural element—after all, cold will kill them."

"Do you need to stir it or something?" was all Larsson asked.

"Of course not, this isn't actually food," said Ek'Ez.

Lorca had not forgotten Lalana's stance on cannibalism. "Actually it is," he said, drawing stares of confusion and judgment.

"Yes, well, this protocol has never been used before, but I am hopeful it will work. I would hate to accidentally turn Lalana into soup." Though apropos, the pun was entirely unintentional. Ek'Ez was simply returning to his chosen analogy for the details of the Great Merge process.

"How long?"

"That is the question," said Ek'Ez. "It could be twelve hours, it could be twelve days. Absent scanners, we have no way of knowing if this is even effective."

Lorca really hoped the time needed was on the lower side of that estimate.

Nine weeks left until decommission.


	30. Exit Strategy

A/N: So attempting to stay awake writing for two days straight may have been overly ambitious... I fell asleep! This will be the last chapter I post before tonight's episode. I didn't quite get to the Buran, but within spitting distance of it, and maybe by this time next week, I'll even be all the way up to Discovery. Perhaps not current to whatever happens tonight, but up to the first episode. Anyway, because tonight's episode may Change Things, I made a list of sentences from future scenes in this fanfic that I have not yet been able to post and put them on my tumblr in order to prove that these scenes already exist and were written before tonight's episode. I've also attempted to explain why doing this is of importance to me. (While the sentences are technically spoilers, without context, they shouldn't actually reveal too much more than the subtle shift in tone as we catch up to the events in the show.)

* * *

He let Li languish in her quarters for a full day before returning to her. She looked a mess when he arrived. She was sitting in the far corner, still wearing the same clothes, her hair starting to shine with oils. Two plates of food sat untouched on a table alongside an empty cup of water. Since she had chosen not to eat, the two cups of water Larsson brought her had not been sufficient sustenance, and she swallowed repeatedly with mild dehydration.

Full system lockout meant no shower, no light controls, no anything. She did seem to have slept on her bed. It was one of the few objects that still functioned as intended when the computer no longer registered you as an entity.

There were some who might see this level of restrictive confinement as torture. A couple plates of food and some water hardly constituted a Federation level of prisoner accommodation. The disabling of the room's safety protocols was even more questionable.

She stood from her place in the corner when he entered. She was strained, but unbroken. Her dark eyes shone with resolve. There seemed to be a true resistance smoldering there—a stubborn refusal to admit wrongdoing or defeat. She faced him without speaking, daring him to finally grant her the promised permission, determined not to break his final order to her as a show of strength.

He made her wait, as Cornwell had made him wait in Sollis and Caxus's living room, for a full minute. "Let's hear it."

She swallowed again and licked dry, cracking lips. "If you unlock my computer access, in my personal files, I have Lalana's explicit permission recorded—"

"No." After their conversation at the turbolift doors weeks ago, it was a slap in the face that she would even try to use this as a defense. "Dr. Ek'Ez told you any permission in this instance would be null and void, and I believe I made it perfectly clear that I agreed with him. This is not an 'explain yourself and you're free to go' conversation. There is no free to go, doctor. Absolutely nothing you say is getting you out of this room and put back on duty. This is a 'you're going to explain until I understand' conversation."

Li took a deep breath, glare unbroken. "I became a doctor because I want to help the most people possible. Every day, billions of people die in the Federation, of diseases that are totally curable, if only we had the right cellular regenerative technology. Lului cells are not just living tissue, captain, they are medical technology. If we do not harness the power of this technology, how can we look all of those people, all of their loved ones, all of the parents who have lost children, in the eyes?"

"A greatest good defense. Really, doctor? The almighty power of love?"

"Starfleet exists for the greatest good! Our very lives are dedicated to the idea that we might sacrifice ourselves in the defense of all the cultures and worlds in the United Federation of Planets. That's all I've been trying to do."

"With one crucial distinction there. You're talking about sacrificing yourself for the greater good, but the person you're sacrificing is Lalana."

Li pouted. "Your judgment is compromised. Just because you're fond of your little pet—"

That had been a step too far on both counts. Lorca's face contorted with fury and he clenched his hands into fists, fighting the urge to pick Li up and throw her. He slammed his fist against the wall instead and roared at her, "Lalana is no one's pet! Maybe if you'd spent more time talking to her instead of sticking her with needles, you'd understand that, _doctor!_ Frankly, if you can't recognize a sentient life form when you see one, then maybe you're in the wrong line of work!"

Li struggled to come up with a response, her mouth gaping like a fish.

Lorca's breath hissed through his teeth as he contained his anger. "In fact, doctor, you're no longer welcome on this ship. Lorca to bridge. Carver, set a course for the nearest starbase, inhabited planet, trading outpost, I don't care what, just go. We have a passenger to drop off."

"Aye, sir."

This was a step too far for Li. She gasped in shock. "You can't! I'll tell the admiralty everything you left out of your reports—"

"You do that," said Lorca, utterly unmoved by the threat. "I'll be sure to let them know about your little unauthorized experiment and have you brought up before a Starfleet Ethics committee."

Li glared, but didn't dare raise Lorca's anger any further because if they both followed through on those threats, it was unlikely she would survive professionally, and investigation from such a committee might not just remove her from Starfleet, it might prevent her from ever practicing science or medicine again. Her life would be over. Mutually assured destruction this was not.

She tried a more defensive play. "That would be a mistake. My family is very well-connected in Starfleet Command—"

"Was well-connected," said Lorca. Li's eyes widened with offense. Lorca found the sight highly satisfying. "Maybe they had some clout a century ago, when your great-great- _great_ -granduncle was alive, but I find it awfully hard to believe that anyone with any real friends back at Command would've been assigned to this old rust bucket. No, Samaritan, what you have isn't connections at Starfleet. What you have is a family legacy in name only, and let's be honest here, it isn't even that, is it? Or did you forget you're descended from Captain Reed's _sister_? There hasn't been a Reed in Starfleet in seventy-five years, and yet you keep beating that dead horse." (This was not strictly true. There had been other Reeds, but they were no particular relation to the famed captain.)

Li purpled. "The Parises—"

"Are a very well-regarded Starfleet family, who I'm sure had to pull a ton of strings to get you a posting as illustrious as _assistant_ doctor on board Starfleet's least remarkable ship." Least remarkable until he'd taken command, at any rate.

They had gotten her the post, in fact. Suddenly it seemed less a genuine gift on their part and more an act of meager charity.

She had one other card to play. She swallowed again.

"There is a shadow organization within Starfleet."

Lorca's mouth fell slightly open. Surely she wasn't going to spin him a conspiracy theory and try to pass that off as justification.

She was.

"They have existed since the Starfleet charter was written. My uncle was involved with them during his time on the Enterprise. They have been secretly controlling and directing events within Starfleet for their own aims. This includes the murder of Starfleet personnel who conflict with those aims. Because of their activity during the time of the Suliban Cabal, if I can prove the true nature of the Cabal's genetic modifications to their soldiers, I can get leverage against the organization in question. And my process was working, captain. I have now sequenced seventy percent of the lului genome. A few more weeks, and I'll have it all, and be able to expose the rot at the heart of Starfleet once and for all."

"Who exactly are these shadowy puppet masters? Illuminati?" he mocked.

"Of course not, that's ridiculous. But I can't tell you who they are or what they're called. Word would get back to them. They have spies everywhere."

He realized he had severely underestimated Li's level of insanity. She wasn't a budding Bond villain, she was a tinfoil hat-wearing nutcase. "This has been absolutely grand, doctor. I'll let you know when we've arrived." He turned on his heel and stormed from the room.

As he headed down the hall towards Morita and Yoon's quarters, his head spun. "Lorca to Larsson."

"Sir."

"Bring Li a pitcher of water."

What the hell had Li's parents been thinking when they named her "Samaritan."

* * *

They left Li on an observation outpost orbiting a yellow star which got very little traffic, but its station chief assured him they would be able to send Li off on the next month's supply ship. Not that Lorca cared. She could rot on that station for all eternity. He made sure Li understood his threat of ending her biomedical career was a sincere one and filed a report explaining her absence as a self-directed research choice. In a way, it was true.

He went into Li's personal files and watched the recorded proof of Lalana's willingness to participate. Lalana spoke her assent with her trademark cheerfulness, seemingly not caring as she said the words "fully understand the dangers present to myself" and absolved Li of any wrongdoing or responsibility. He watched the recording only once. It was impossible to reconcile this liveliness with the seemingly lifeless husk lying in a vat. He deleted it completely from the Triton's database.

There was no change in Lalana's condition and only five people left on the ship even aware of the situation. The only sign anything was amiss was that Li was gone and those five people had suddenly developed some very odd habits and very short tempers. Yoon, for example, seemed to have lost her effusive radiance and barely spoke to anyone or socialized. Morita was, somehow, even more terse. Larsson was skulking around deck eight without any good explanation, and Lorca suddenly seemed to have lost his sense of humor and developed a short fuse. He snapped at Benford for letting the engineering crew file their report late and Benford quietly requested a conference in the ready room where he said:

"Is everything all right? You've been off lately. You can tell me what's going on."

This was probably true, but Lorca did not want to put Benford in the position of having to make any decisions about what was going on if it wasn't necessary. "If I need help, I'll tell you," he said, and Benford took him at his word.

At least there was work he could throw himself into as a distraction. With the upcoming reassignment to the Buran, he began a full crew assessment, reviewing service records and conducting interviews. One benefit of having ended up on the Triton was that he now had firsthand experience with its crew and could determine which of them passed muster to continue on under his command.

There were the obvious choices. Benford, Morita, Carver (absolutely Carver, she was secretly Lorca's favorite person on the ship), Yoon, Ek'Ez, Russo, even Kerrigan, and Lorca thought Larsson, but then Larsson dropped a bombshell in his interview.

"This is mostly a formality," Lorca began, "you're obviously a lock for the transfer, and I'll see about getting you a promotion to lieutenant commander while we're at it. Second shift security chief, if you want it. Or senior armory officer."

"Sir, with respect, I am resigning from Starfleet."

Lorca looked up. "Come again?"

"I am resigning from Starfleet."

Larsson could be a bit literal sometimes. "I got that," said Lorca. "Why would you go and do a thing like that? It's not because of this thing with Lalana, is it? Or something about my command?" Either thing would represent a serious issue in need of immediate address.

Larsson scratched at his chin. "To be honest, sir, I would be honored to serve with you on the Buran, but it is a little bit about the lului."

Lorca put his padd down on the table and looked at Larsson expectantly.

"You see, until Lalana, everyone has only ever thought of me as a brute. And yes, I know, I am big, I am strong, I am a natural choice to be a security officer, and I don't mind the work, but... it is not that I chose to be a security officer. It was more a choice that was made for me by everyone around me because of how I look. Now that I have gotten the chance to do something I wanted to do, I think I would like to write a book."

Lorca realized what Larsson was saying and actually felt good about something for the first time in two weeks. "You could write a book on the Buran. Be the ship historian."

"With respect, I would like to write a book on history which is nothing to do with Starfleet, on a planet with good fishing."

Lorca's face softened into a genuine smile. "I think that sounds like a wonderful idea."

Larsson stretched out a hand to the captain. "Thank you, sir. Even though it has only been for a few months, I have never had a better captain. I will be sure to dedicate my book to you."

They shook hands. Larsson really was impressively big. Even to Lorca, his hand seemed massive. "Thank you, Einar. I'm honored."

The good feeling persisted through the next three interviews. Lorca signed off on two members of maintenance and a stellar cartographer. He was about halfway through the crew.

As the cartographer left the room thinking the encounter had not been as dour and tense as everyone on the ship was saying the interviews were, the comm beeped. "Yoon to Lorca!"

There was no mistaking the tone of joy in Yoon's voice. He didn't even ask or wait for her to explain. "On my way!"


	31. Nemo Sum Game

A/N: In my sleep-deprived state I accidentally splinched a few paragraphs that were supposed to be in the previous chapter from the draft, so if you read it when it was first posted, go back a chapter and Ctrl-F "family" for the missing section.

Title is a triple play on words: nemo sum, Latin for "no one"; a zero-sum game is a situation in which each participants gain or loss is exactly balanced by the gain or loss of the other participants; Captain Nemo was the commander of the Nautilus.

* * *

When he arrived, her head was poking out of the vat and she was blue again, chatting merrily away with Yoon. For a moment, he was very happy, and then almost instantly he was very, very angry. She did not need to ask to know what he was feeling, because never had anything ever been more clearly written on his face.

He crossed over to the vat in three long strides, elbowed Yoon aside, reached his hands in, grabbed Lalana, and pulled her halfway out. Biomimetic gel clung to her like putty. It felt like partially-congealed pudding under his fingers. He shook her.

" _What the hell were you thinking!_ "

She let out a soft trill, the sound usually associated with alarm or surprise.

"Captain!" said Yoon, grabbing hold of his arm.

"Stay out of this," he snapped at Yoon, then resumed shouting at Lalana. "You were free to go anywhere, do anything! An entire universe of stars to run to and you came back to the one place you're not supposed to be! What the hell, Lalana!"

She trilled again. This was not an adequate level of communication.

"What!"

"Samaritan asked for my help."

Lorca looked at Lalana in utter disgust. "You do not get to blame this on Dr. Li. Don't you dare. I see exactly what you're doing. And if you think I'm going to fall for one of your cleverly-crafted 'repurposed truths'—"

She covered her face with her tail and began knocking her hands together.

"I'm not falling for that, either!" he exclaimed, face contorted with fury.

Yoon was aghast. "Captain!"

"Don't give me that look, lieutenant. This is the lului equivalent of crocodile tears." It wasn't, but it might as well have been.

Thankfully the translators were on full idiomatic settings, not the lower, more literal threshold Lalana preferred, and she understood his meaning perfectly. She squirmed in his hands. Her fur actively pushed back against his fingers. "I'm not lying! She said she needed my help to save Starfleet! I thought I could return the favor and save your people like you saved mine!"

"Save us from what?" Yoon ventured, eager to try and extricate Lalana from what she felt was an unjustified interrogation.

Lorca rolled his eyes and let out a low groaning growl. It was impossible to explain without dropping into a tone that bordered on levity. "Dr. Li is convinced Starfleet is being run by an illuminati shadow cabal."

"What?" went Yoon. From her perspective, this conversation just kept getting weirder and weirder.

"Exactly." Lorca returned his attention to Lalana. Bits of gooey gel were dripping down the outside of the vat. "You fell for that load of crap?"

Lalana's hands stopped tapping and her tail slid up. "So it is not true?"

"Of course it's not true! It's a goddamn conspiracy theory! Crazy people make them up!"

"Why?"

"Because they're crazy!"

Yoon immediately tried to jump to Lalana's defense again. "You can't blame her for not knowing that! How could she know that?"

Lorca looked at Yoon with something akin to wryness. "She could have asked. You like asking questions, don't you, Lalana? What does this mean? Why do humans do that?" The level of mocking derision in his voice bordered on comical. Then he dropped back into anger. "And yet, when Li spins you some yarn about a shadow government, you don't think to ask anyone? That just sounded perfectly right as rain to you?" Cornwell had clearly been right about the dangers of letting Lalana loose into the galaxy.

"She said I could not tell you. Any one of you might secretly be section agents."

"Oh my god," said Yoon, realizing how deep this delusion went. The assistant doctor hadn't just been crazy, she needed serious medical intervention.

"But Gabriel," Lalana continued, "I do not think Samaritan was lying."

"Just because Li believes it doesn't make it true." His arms were beginning to hurt. She probably weighed ninety pounds with all the goo on her. He was going to have to put her down or bring her closer towards him fairly soon or the choice would be made for him.

"Then I will find proof," she said.

"You can't prove something that's not true."

"If I do, then you will forgive Samaritan and forgive me, too."

His arms began to tremble faintly from the strain. Lorca closed his eyes. When he opened them, he had made his decision. Despite the fact she was covered in gel, he drew her close against his shoulder and lifted her free from the vat. He did not release her immediately. "When you put yourself in danger on this ship, it's my responsibility. I don't want to lose anyone else."

For over a month now, Lorca had been operating under the self-imposed delusion Walter Chen's death did not affect him, that he was somehow above the grief and melancholy and doubt of it all. He was not. Morita had made the choice that sent Chen on that mission because Chen had asked to go, but Lorca had signed off on it, and he knew Chen's service record. He knew the service records of everyone on the crew. While there was no one single point of blame, he was the ultimate bearer of responsibility for events on his ship.

Lalana vibrated the gel off the end of her tail into the vat and then put her tail onto his head so the filaments stroked through his hair. Feeling like an interloper, Yoon made her way into the bathroom, the only place she could go.

"How did you even get back on the goddamn ship," he whispered.

"A private shuttle charter flight." There had been a few of those; people avoiding the transporter queue in favor of a trip with a view.

He sighed. She was gooey, but for once, because of the heated nature of the vat, she was warm. "I don't know what to do with you."

"Can you take me to the shower? I am dripping on the floor."

With a short, involuntary laugh, he did as asked.

"You do understand," she said once she was in the shower, "that I was merely in a state of suspension and not going to die? It is possible to survive in suspension for many years."

"Maybe if you and Li had actually gotten some goddamn oversight instead of sneaking around like a pair of bandits, that would have been clear to someone beside you!" He turned the water on, full blast, hot, and then assessed the state of his uniform in the mirror, which was not looking good. He made a face as he scraped the biomimetic gel from his neck.

"Allow me, captain," said Yoon, giving him a washcloth and using a second one to assist in removing some of the goo from his tunic.

Lalana stepped out of the shower, dry as a bone. "But we could not include anyone in case the section found out."

"I don't want to hear another word about that shadow cabal," he said. It sounded like a threat.

"Very well, but I will prove that they exist."

Lorca groaned loudly and leaned his hands against the vanity counter. "You are not investigating an imaginary shadow cabal in Starfleet. Do you hear me? That's an order."

"Then do I still have my commission as ensign?"

He'd forgotten about that particular joke. "If it'll get you to do what I say for once, then fine."

"Then, aye, sir."

It was something, at least. "Right. I'm going to change. Ensign, you are not to leave these quarters until I say so. Understood?"

"Aye, sir!" At least she liked this little game and seemed eager to play along at being a member of Starfleet. They'd see how long that enthusiasm lasted when she realized the order was sincere.

Six weeks left until decommission.

* * *

Given the fact they had already made one unusual stop, Lorca decided it was too much a risk to make another. Someone might begin to suspect something was up. Certainly if reports of a lului suddenly surfaced at the Triton's unscheduled stop, someone would put two and two together. Lalana would be spending the remaining six weeks of the Triton's service life confined to two small rooms until such a time as they could sneak her off with the cargo at Spacedock.

This did not bother her. "I do miss hydroponics, but it is very nice in here. There are many stars outside the window, and a great quantity of music I have not yet listened to."

He scrupulously avoided going to Morita and Yoon's quarters to arouse any further suspicion and kept his contact with Lalana to the comms in his ready room and quarters. He could almost pretend she was somewhere else, on someone else's ship, and not an ongoing issue he was going to have to deal with.

Absent any other meaningful entertainment, she queried him as to the events of his day, listened to any complaints, and offered her own pithy, fortune-worthy insights, like "even a captain cannot always control the crew that he commands" and "the ground is an ocean you can walk upon."

Unloading his day on her was fun. She stood completely outside Starfleet's command structure, had immense patience, and never once suggested anything he talked about was unimportant in the grand scheme of things, even when sometimes it was. About the worst thing he could accuse her of was occasionally providing too much of an echo chamber. She sometimes provided an alternate perspective in a gently supportive manner, but more often she seemed to want to try to see things from his perspective and support his views on any given topic.

With one exception. She remained determined to investigate Yoon's insane theory. He did his best to warn her off it. "You can get into real trouble if you start sticking your nose into Starfleet's business. I'm serious, Lalana. They could have you arrested."

"Ah, like Venel and Egarell? For how long?"

He threw a number out. "Eighty years!"

"That is not so bad."

He stood there for several moments, staring into space with his hands in the air in confusion, wondering what precisely it took to get her to take any part of this seriously. "Eight hundred years?" he tried.

"Now that is something more approaching a punitive length of time!" she clicked at him.

She was not taking it seriously at all. "They'll send you back to Luluan."

She went quiet. Then, "That is not funny."

"My point exactly. Take this seriously."

Finally, she said, "I will not look into it because it seems to upset you that I would. Will that suffice?"

"That'll do very nicely. You promise?" There was silence. His voice dropped into a warning tone. "Lalana."

"I cannot promise not to look into it forever, but, for as long as it concerns you, I will not."

That seemed to be as much guarantee as he was going to get. Fair enough. He couldn't stop her wasting her time or getting into trouble her entire life, not given the length of it. At some point, he'd be dead.

On the one hand, her almost constant irreverence surely constituted some form of character flaw, but on the other, more often than not their conversations ended up in laughter.

"You are the worst," he said to her late one night, after she attempted a series of rather juvenile knock-knock jokes she had apparently gotten from the ship's databanks.

"And you are the best, which balances out quite nicely."

He quietly smiled to himself, glad she could not see his face, and retorted, "Flattery will get you nowhere."

"But flattery and a starship can take you very far!" He couldn't decide whether to laugh or groan at that, so he did both.

They were ten days out from D-Day, which was what the crew had taken to calling their pending release from the dingy old halls of the Triton, when he walked into his quarters and discovered Lalana sitting in the middle of his bed. He slammed his fist to lock the door behind him. " _How did you get in here!_ "

"Da Hee and Reiko would like some time to themselves now, so I thought I could stay the night with you. Do not worry, no one saw me arrive."

He smeared a hand across his face. "That's not what I mean. This door was locked. Did Morita..."

"Einar helped me."

Ten days left in his commission. The Swede had a funny idea of how best to leave a lasting impression. It was clever, though. What was Lorca going to do, throw him in the brig for ten days for breaking into the captain's quarters? People would ask why. Lorca didn't want people asking questions.

He contemplated calling Morita and Yoon to come pick Lalana up, but that seemed a little cruel, given that they'd been hosting Lalana in their quarters for two months and probably deserved that alone time. It didn't add up, though. Morita would have asked him before pawning Lalana off. "Where does Reiko think you are?"

"With Dr. Ek'Ez."

"And Ek'Ez thinks you're with..."

"Einar."

"Then you can go back to Einar's quarters."

"Nnnnnn," she went. "But I do not want to go to Einar's quarters. I want to stay with you. I will repurpose a truth if it will help. Come, tell me about your day."

He crossed his arms and shook his head. "You're more trouble than you're worth."

"I think you'll find that's not the case, if you'll come join me."

* * *

The comms beeped. "Benford to captain."

"Stop, stop!" went Lorca, sitting up and gasping for breath. "Captain here."

"Is... is everything all right, captain? There was a report of screaming from your quarters?"

Quarters were supposed to provide noise isolation for privacy. It was likely they had tripped an internal monitoring alarm. Lorca bit down on his fist and hastily collected himself. "Nope, I'm fine, Jack, everything's fine."

Lalana stuck her tongue out and flattened it against her eye to keep from laughing.

"... Are you sure, sir?"

"I'll try not to make so much noise. Lorca out."

Lorca and Lalana sat shock still. Then they burst into laughter, a fearsome combination of clicks and deep, booming guffaws. "I can't, I just can't. How did you even think to do that?"

"Sollis explained the biology and standard techniques, and then it was a simple matter to figure out how to lelulallen the right cells." He was never going to view lelulallen quite the same.

"Sollis?"

"Yes, we speak every day."

Lorca blinked several times and then flopped back onto the bed. He had not realized Lalana was talking to other people over the comms. "Remind me to send her a fruit basket." He chuckled some more.

"And how did that compare to Billingsley?"

"That wasn't even on the same planet."

"How could it be? We are on a starship."

Lorca batted her lightly with his hand in admonishment. "I need a shower."

When he returned, damp and mostly recovered, he found her poking around the bedroom, opening the storage areas built into the walls. "What do you think you're doing?"

Another human would have jumped or reacted in some way reflecting the fact they had been caught snooping, but Lalana did not have the same understanding of private space and failed to register any wrongdoing. "I am learning all of your items."

"Learning them, or licking them?" he shot back.

She trilled her tongue at him. "I have learned now not to lick things around humans! But yes, I did lick a few. This looked like it had been alive, but tasted wrong." She pointed her tail at a pair of leather shoes. They were synthetic, of course.

There wasn't really anything overly incriminating in his quarters (and certainly she was the last one to pass judgment on anything, being largely ignorant of human social mores), so he let her rummage, answering questions periodically, until she made her way back around to the bed. "And I was wondering about this book." It was his copy of Twenty-Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. "Why do you keep it next to your bed?"

"Well, this, this isn't just a book. I know you thinks books are flat and not worth your time, but, come here. Maybe this one'll surprise you." She hopped up onto the bed beside him. He picked up the book, the worn texture of its cover a familiar comfort, lay down, and opened it to the first page exactly. "Chapter one, A Floating Reef. In the year 1866 the whole maritime population of Europe and America was excited by an inexplicable phenomenon..." Lalana curled up contentedly besides him and they were soon aboard the _Abraham Lincoln_ with Pierre Aronnax, Conseil, and Ned Land.

* * *

Morita looked over the nightly security logs. Stress alarm triggered in the captain's quarters? She cleared her throat, signaling Lorca to come to the security console, and pointed to the log. "Dare I even ask?"

"No, you may not," said Lorca, reaching past her and deleting the offending record from the system.


	32. Home

A/N: I really wanted the characters to be able to geek out about the specs of the Buran, but... there are no specs released! They've not even said what class the ship is. Sad times. It would be nice to say "four photon torpedo bays" or "415 meters long" or really any sort of details... but I'm not well-versed enough in starship specs to pull them out my arse. Ah well! If they release specs later, I will come back and revise.

Also, I am sorry for all the back-to-back, uh, encounters. Ahaha. But, in-universe, there are days and even weeks between! And it all connects to future events. I promise there's story payoff. There's method to the madness.

...It's not my fault Lorca's so irresistibly charming. I blame Jason Isaacs.

* * *

"There she is."

Lorca and Benford stood staring at the curves of the USS Buran on the viewscreen.

There was no denying it. It was love at first sight. Lorca looked like he might cry with joy. "Have you ever seen anything more beautiful, Jack?"

Benford liked starships, of course, but in the back of his head, he thought to himself, _My wife, you jackass_. He meant the term with the deepest and most enduring affection. He normally might have said it out loud (minus the "jackass"; they were on the bridge), but it was clear that this was something bordering on a religious experience for Lorca, and he hardly wanted to sully the moment with what might turn out to be an unwelcome bit of comedy.

"And it's mine. All mine." He knew every inch of it from the schematics: every nut and bolt, every measurement and dimension. Every corridor, access tube, panel, and conduit. "I love it."

Benford clapped Lorca on the back. "Congratulations, captain." They shook hands.

"Couldn't've made it here without you, Jack."

"And don't you forget it."

"Sir, we're cleared to dock."

"All right, Carver, take us in."

The sad thing about bringing the Triton to rest in its final port was not the loss of the starship that they had called home for half a year, but the fact that moving the ship took the Buran out of their view.

As the airlocks opened and the crew flooded out, Lorca took advantage of his position as captain to beam past the crowds and make his way to the observation lounge overlooking his new ship.

He stood there in the lounge, staring at the gleaming metal under the Spacedock lights in a state of rapture. He almost didn't notice when Billingsley sidled up next to him. If there was anyone who appreciated starships, it was an engineer, particularly one like her whose passion was for building and refitting them. "It's a beautiful ship, sir," she said tersely.

Lorca glanced back towards the door. "Looks like you beat the crowd."

"I worked here for three years. I know every shortcut."

It was no secret that this observation lounge was the best location to view the new ship. Someone—Carver, he thought—had disseminated that information to all departments on the Triton. Until the Buran was opened up to receive its new crew and cargo, this lounge was the extent of their access.

Almost everyone wanted a look. For most, it was their first chance to experience the ship that would be their home for the foreseeable future. For others, a chance to glimpse what would not be, if they could stand to look.

There were, of course, plenty of crewmen who skipped the spectacle in favor of visiting family and friends down on Earth. After all, the ship wasn't going anywhere without them.

Billingsley stared at the Buran with an unreadable expression. "Shame I won't get to work on it."

"What assignment did they give you?" Lorca inquired.

"Tri-Rho Nautica."

He whistled appreciatively. "Now that is a posting." It was a newer shipyard, a little further out in the reaches, and reportedly a massive installation. If you could stand to be far from Earth (and Billingsley certainly could, since she was not from Earth to begin with), it was supposed to be an engineer's dream.

"Was there a problem with my work aboard the Triton, sir?" Her voice was enough to drop the temperature two degrees.

That was not the response he had expected. He glanced over at her. Her eyes were locked on the Buran. "You wanted to work on a starbase. You said so."

"So the assignment is a reward?" she said dryly. "Every girl who bangs you gets the posting she asks for? Or just when you get tired of her?" It had not escaped her notice how little time he'd had for her these past two months. In the past ten days, he scarcely seemed to register the fact she even existed.

His eyebrows shot up. "You're out of line, chief."

Then she turned her head. "I'm not your chief anymore. Apparently, I'm not your anything anymore." She spun on her heel and strode away.

Lorca saw Cornwell approaching as Billingsley departed. Cornwell gave the engineer a glance as she passed. "Problem?" asked Cornwell, taking Billingsley's place next to him at the window.

"Disappointed she didn't make the cut," he said, but it was a lie. Billingsley was right. He would have kept her around if he wanted to. He did not. Between the negativity, the glowering, and weighed against recent events and the company of other people, it seemed a convenient opportunity to toss her off onto some other assignment so he didn't have to deal with the repercussions of breaking off relations in any official or direct sense, much less continue working alongside her after such a termination. Hadn't quite worked out according to plan. He thought the shipyard would make her happy, not that she would rather sacrifice it to work on the Buran. The fact that she felt that way made him feel confident about his decision.

"I was going to meet you on the Triton," said Cornwell, "and then you beamed over here. Why are you never where I expect?" It was clearly a reference to Risa.

"I could say the same thing about you." She smiled and he knew he was forgiven.

"They're ready for your inspection."

"Is that an order, commodore?"

She raised an eyebrow. "You don't want to go?"

"Not yet," he said with a slight shrug. "For now, I'd just like to stand here and take in the view."

She leaned in conspiratorially. "What if I told you I stashed a bottle in your new ready room as a welcome present?"

He decided to trade up for a better view.

* * *

"State of the art," Cornwell declared, running one hand across the back of the captain's chair. "Outfitted with full-coverage holocomms in the command areas, top of the line phaser banks, twice as many photon torpedoes as the Triton..."

Lorca grinned like an idiot. "I love it when you talk tech."

She smirked right back and sipped her Laphroaig.

Lorca put his hand over hers on the back of the chair. "You spoil me, you know that?" They clinked their glasses together.

The comms chimed. Even though it was only audio, Cornwell pulled her hand away. "Benford to Lorca."

"Go," said Lorca, shrugging at Cornwell in mock exasperation. He was too happy to be seriously annoyed by the interruption.

"They said you're already aboard. Have you started your inspection?" Benford, as XO, was supposed to accompany Lorca.

"Commodore Cornwell and I are just going over some last details."

Silence. Then, "Right. So, my best to the commodore, and I'll get out of your hair."

"Actually, Jack, if you could hang tight, there is something I need to discuss with you. Give me, say, twenty minutes?" Cornwell mouthed a revision to Lorca. "Thirty. Thirty minutes."

"Aye-aye, sir. Benford out."

"I'm all yours, Commodore Cornwell."

She smiled and turned the glass in her hand. He was that.

* * *

Lorca had Benford meet him on the Triton. Most of the crew was gone at this point. Some had already packed up and departed for other assignments, but most had been drawn down to the swirling blue gem of a planet they called home. The few crew who were present were packing things up. Benford crossed his arms as Lorca approached. "This had better be good."

Lorca glanced up at the little joins where he knew the security monitors were. "Not here."

Benford's annoyance immediately dissolved into unbridled curiosity. So there was something going on. His curiosity only deepened when they arrived outside Lorca's quarters.

"Let me preface this by saying it was completely out of my control," said Lorca. "At no point have I had any choice in any of this."

That struck Benford as odd. Normally, Lorca was the one who had people dancing to his tune, not the other way around. He kept his tongue as the door slid open.

"Hello, Jackson!"

To call Benford surprised was an understatement. His mouth hung open, his brain seemed stuck, and he was speechless. Lorca half-pushed him into the room and closed the door behind them.

Lorca immediately launched into his plan. "Right, so, Cassie's pregnant. Have her refuse to beam up here and take a shuttle instead. Cite worries about the baby. I mean, transporters are largely perfectly safe, but no one would fault a pregnant woman for wanting to be careful. Transporter accidents are a lot scarier than shuttles."

"Whoa!" said Benford loudly. "Hold up here, Gabriel. What!? And also, what!" He gestured wildly at Lalana.

"She stowed away on the ship," said Lorca, as if that were utterly unimportant. "Now, if we can get back to the plan..."

"I was invited," said Lalana, "by Dr. Li."

Everything clicked all at once. Dr. Li's unceremonious ousting onto a remote research outpost. The tenseness and secrecy in the weeks following. But there had to be more to the story, given that the captain's temper had gone from foul to pleasant six weeks back, which Benford had noted in his logs. Something occurred to Benford. "How long has she been in here?"

"In here specifically? Ah... A week?" Again, Lorca was dismissive.

Benford assumed Lorca was fudging the timeline. Lorca was a man of precision. He only dropped that when he had something to hide. The commander shook his head. "You are really something," he said. It wasn't clear whether he meant Lorca, Lalana, or both of them.

"Right, so, Cassie. Shuttle. You gonna help or what?"

* * *

The first step was to move Lalana to the largely deserted Buran. The second step was to conduct as thorough a starship inspection as had ever been performed while they waited for Cassie to arrive. The third step was to put Lalana on the shuttle and get her off Spacedock. The fourth and final step was for Lalana to contact Cornwell at some later point in time and apologize for taking a very slow space cruiser and going into hibernation during the trip. Foolproof, utterly.

They managed step one by putting Lalana inside a crate with Lorca's things and personally walking it over to the Buran. No one questioned them, though some people did seem to think it a little odd the captain and first officer were doing their own gruntwork. Odd in a good way, as a former Triton crewmember commented upon passing them in the corridor.

"Best way to lead is by example," boasted Lorca in response.

Once they were out of earshot, Benford said, "If people start looking to you as an example, Starfleet is ruined."

"Can you let me have one compliment?"

"Right now? While we're doing this?"

There was a faint double-tap from inside the crate. The corridor was clear. Lorca opened the crate. "Everything all right in there?"

Lalana was looking up at him with enormous green eyes. This was unlike the bow box. She was able to sit up, the seal was not airtight, and he was right next to her the whole way. "Yes, I was just giving you a compliment."

Lorca quietly laughed at her. "Thank you, Lalana. Now, shh." For the remainder of the journey, she only tapped back when Lorca tapped first.

They left her in the new captain's quarters and the inspection commenced. From hull to stern and aft to port, Lorca and Benford wandered with checklists and consulted with various Spacedock engineers performing their own final checks. The ship was as beautiful inside as it was out. The corridors were shiny and bright, the panels were perfect and smooth and not a single dent, scratch, or misalignment. Beneath the panels lay miles of conduits and cabling, every last inch secured and triple-checked. Lorca thought the ship seemed perfect right down to its molecules. He could probably have Lalana inspect it on a microscopic scale and she would confirm as much.

A random engineer contacted them and announced Cassidy Benford had arrived. "Go greet her," said Lorca. It wouldn't do for Benford's wife to arrive and then turn right around too quickly. "I'll catch up with you later."

Minus Benford, the remaining inspection took twice as long. Lorca was only two-thirds of the way through when he decided to take a break and check on Lalana.

He entered his new quarters expecting to find her having turned the place upside-down and inside-out, but upon entry, there was no sight of her. "Lalana?"

"In here."

She was sitting inside the crate next to his clothes. He leaned against the edge. "What are you doing? You don't have to stay in there. I locked the door. Come on out."

"I prefer it in here. It is the only place in here that feels like you. The rest of the room, it does not feel like you yet."

"That's because I haven't unpacked. Want to help?"

She did, of course, delighting in the various human objects being put in their places. As they removed things from the crate, she said, "It is not the unpacking that makes the room feel like you. It's the shedding."

"Shedding?"

"Yes, your species sheds everywhere. Hair and skin cells... and they barely degrade. Right now only your things feel like you, not the room. Perhaps in a few weeks. Did you have a nice time with Commodore Cornwell?"

He froze with an old cigar box of mementos in his hand. "I... Ah..."

"You did not?"

"That's not... I had to. She would've realized something was up if I refused."

"Then you did not enjoy it?"

"I didn't say that!" He was not about to impugn Katrina's reputation in that regard, not when he considered her record essentially flawless. "Is this gonna be a problem for you?"

"What do you mean?"

"Me and Katrina."

"It seems to be a problem for you. You are being very strange right now, Gabriel."

He suddenly remembered lului reproduced in a giant sludge pile. "My mistake. A human would be jealous, but, uh..." He snickered. "You're not human, are you?"

"What was your first clue? The tail or the fur?" They had a good laugh at that. "Why would a human be jealous?"

"Well, most humans like it when the person they're with is only with them."

"Ah, because of the binary reproduction?"

It was one of many factors. "Yeah."

"Dartarans are the same. Very territorial about mates. But you are not this way."

"You can say that again." She did, of course. "I take it you aren't either, because of the... giant merge?"

"Great Merge," she corrected. "But lului also have individual preferences independent of merging. Love and reproduction are not the same thing."

 _Neither are love and sex_ , thought Lorca, since the lului method of reproduction could hardly be described as sexual. "So if you loved someone, but they loved someone else?"

"I would be very happy for them! Especially if they are loved in return. But Katrina would be unhappy to know you have been with me?"

"Very," said Lorca, chuckling. "But for a completely different set of reasons." Most of them having to do with her lack of knowledge as to Lalana's whereabouts the past two months.

They meandered off into other subjects for a while, emptied most of the crate, and the door chimed. It was the Benfords.

Cassidy Benford was very different from the last time Lorca had seen her—seven months different, to be precise. She look good, if a bit strained. She had a great support network of family but it was still never easy having your husband gone for so long. Benford would probably have been on paternity leave except the Triton opportunity had arrived the same week they had found out, and both he and Cassidy had decided the promotion to Commander and chance to serve as Lorca's XO were too important to pass up.

"Gabriel," said Cassidy in greeting. She was not a particularly pretty woman, with plain features and tousled brown hair that never seemed to fall the same way anywhere on her head, but she was smart as a whip, moderately successful in her career as a composer, and very strong-willed. Her confidence made her much more beautiful than many women who would otherwise be considered more attractive.

"I am Lalana." Lalana extended her tail out.

Cassidy wasn't quite sure what to make of Lalana, but she reached her hand out and shook Lalana's tail. "Jack told me about you. He said you liked my music?"

"Yes, it is wonderful! I enjoy it very much."

Perhaps responding to some surge of hormones at seeing Lalana, Cassidy's stomach moved as the baby kicked. This elicited a rapid stream of questions from Lalana at such speed it was impossible for anyone to get a word in edgewise to provide any answers.

"Ah!" said Lorca sharply, cutting Lalana off. "You can ask her all these questions on the shuttle. But absolutely no licking, lelulallen-ing, or any other lului things to this baby, understood?"

"Yes, captain," said Lalana, in a tone that made it sound like she would have rolled her eyes if she could.

Lorca lifted one side of the crate's lid. "In you go."

They were off again, halfway across the length of the ship to where the shuttle was waiting with a fresh pilot ready to execute his final duty as a Starfleet officer. Larsson had an almost absurdly unkempt appearance now that it was officially his last day. His feet were up on the shuttle controls.

"Now I know why Starfleet doesn't do Casual Fridays," said Lorca judgmentally.

"You going to cite me for a uniform infraction?"

"I could have had you court martialed for breaking into my quarters and letting this one in," said Lorca, opening the crate to reveal Lalana.

"Hello, Einar!" she said as she popped up and grabbed hold of the edge of the crate.

"Hello beautiful," replied the Swede, swinging his feet down and turning the chair towards her. "Ready for some fishing?"

It threw Lorca slightly hearing the conversation between them, especially now that he knew the lului stance on monogamy. Suddenly he felt slightly territorial. Not that he had any right to. He was probably the last person in the galaxy who had that right.

"Yes, but, may I speak with the captain alone please?"

Larsson looked at Lorca with cold blue eyes, shrugged a little, and said, "Sure." He left them alone in the shuttle.

"Gabriel, I—"

Lorca reached down into the crate and wrapped one arm around her. "Do whatever you want to do. It's your life. Just don't come back here."

"I will not, but..." Her tail pressed against the side of his face. "Please take good care of this face for me. It's my favorite one."

He pecked her lightly on the head. "I promise. And you take care of this tail. I'm pretty fond of it myself." One final chuckle, one final tongue click, and then she was gone.

Returning to his quarters, he unpacked the last items from the crate himself. _Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea_ was at the bottom wrapped in a pillowcase; the very first thing he had put in. They had only gotten a third of the way through. He opened it to page fifty and read the familiar words: "You make your own fortune."

He set the book down on the bedside table. Now he was home.


	33. Transitional Devices

_A/N: The fortune cookies in this story are actually based on real blind picks from a bag of cookies I purchased at Panda Express for the purpose of this story, and I did the exact same thing I describe Lorca doing when I picked them out._

* * *

There was time before departure for one in-person meeting with Admiral Wainwright. Lorca checked his uniform in the bathroom in Starfleet Headquarters. No dust, no wrinkles, everything perfectly straight and in order. All set.

Emerging from the bathroom, he found Cornwell in the waiting area and instinctively checked the time. The meeting wasn't for ten more minutes.

"We're running early for once," said Cornwell, motioning for Lorca to join her.

They strode down the wood-paneled halls bedecked with images of Starfleet's history. Schematics and designs of the earliest starships and starbases, a starmap of the route of the NX-01 USS Enterprise's first voyage, official portraits of Admirals, including Archer's portrait before his ascension to the Presidency.

It had always struck Lorca as needlessly backward-looking. While history was important, more important to him and to the present of Starfleet was the future that lay before them, and that future was the unknown.

Of course, they couldn't very well replace the art with blank canvases, apropos as that would be.

They arrived at a small conference room designed for private meetings and audiences. Admiral Wainwright was not present, but Vice Admiral Kariuki was. She shook Lorca's hand. "We should wait for John, but I just wanted to say how very impressed I am by everything you've done so far. We're all very excited to see what you do next."

"Well, thank you, Admiral. I'm excited to find that out myself."

Kariuki offered some small talk for a couple minutes and then Wainwright came in with all the bluster and bombast of his reputation. Even though everyone was running early, Wainwright had decided to take his time walking over, throw around his weight a little, because he could. Lorca fully understood the appeal, much as he hated being on the receiving end of it. "Captain Lorca! Man of the hour. Congratulations on the new command. But that's not why we called you here."

Wainwright gestured for everyone to sit. "We'd like to talk to you about the lului."

Many months ago, Lorca had avoided being chewed out by Wainwright on the subject of Lalana. Apparently that luck had just run out. Lorca sat up in alert and wished Cornwell had warned him.

Kariuki spoke next. "This is considered classified on the highest level. It does not leave this room. Two weeks ago, we noticed an aberrant signal on our communications network in the Kassae Sector." The Kassae Sector was one of two sectors containing the Briar Patch, the other being the Risa sector. Luluan was in the Kassae part.

Lului, singular and plural. Apparently this meeting was in reference to the plural. Lorca relaxed. "Aberrant how?"

"It was piggybacking on our regular transmissions. It looked like a glitch, but when the glitch appeared to correspond with two database incursions, it was flagged for further investigation. We believe this to be the work of the alien you mentioned meeting, Yoo-mali?"

"Umale," said Lorca.

"Right. Your report was very detailed, but we were hoping you might be able to offer some insight into what the alien wants."

"That depends on what the data incursion was, exactly. What did he take?" Lorca inadvertently defaulted to Lalana's lului gendering practice.

Kariuki shifted uncomfortably. "That's the thing. He didn't take anything. He left diagrams for synthetic molecules."

"Synthetic molecules?"

"We believe them to be pharmaceutical in nature, but they're unlike anything we've ever seen. We attempted to contact him, but there was no response. Incoming transmissions seem to have been disabled."

"We're interested in any explanation you have," said Cornwell.

"Sounds to me like 'don't call us, we'll call you,'" declared Lorca, not that this was the part of the mystery they were calling upon him to solve. "That would definitely fit with my impression of Umale. Now if I had to guess... I'd say these molecules are his way of saying thanks. I can't completely rule out any danger, but lului are very adamant about only killing for food. Umale's a little different, operates under slightly looser rules, but if he possessed both a biological weapon and the temperament to use it, I rather think he would have done so against the hunters or the initial invaders on the planet."

As far as tactical assessments went, it seemed more than sound.

"What I don't understand is how these lului even have these molecules to give us. They don't even have spaceships!"

"That's by choice, sir," replied Lorca. For most of the lului, anyway. "The technology they do have seems to be more advanced than ours."

"We still haven't figured out what that silver box is," said Kariuki. The project was under her oversight.

"My science officer calls them a 'post-warp' society. Hard as it is to believe a species might get to the stars and then turn back."

"Right, well, I hope you'll agree that these molecules merit further investigation, Admiral," said Kariuki. Suddenly Lorca realized what was going on. Kariuki was trying to get Admiral Hatchet to sign off on a research project. He smiled.

Whether Kariuki got the approval or not, Lorca's role in the conversation was over, and Cornwell escorted him out.

"I thought lului didn't use genders," said Cornwell once they were back in the hall.

"Ah, no. They don't."

Cornwell gave Lorca her most disapproving psychologist look. "It's disrespectful to assign them to aliens."

"Blame Lalana for that one. She likes genders a lot." That was an understatement. "She sort of... assigned them to all the lului. I don't think she gets that it might be rude. She thinks it's fun."

"But you know better," said Cornwell.

Lorca looked at the map of the NX-01 Enterprise route on the wall. The Briar Patch was visible, as was Risa. "You're right. I'll be more mindful in the future."

Cornwell turned to look at the map, too. "And speaking of Lalana, we still haven't been able to locate her."

"It's only been a couple of months," said Lorca dismissively (and imprecisely).

"Why do I get the feeling there's something you're not telling me, Gabriel."

Lorca took a breath. "She's fine. She'll turn up when she wants to." And by that time, he intended to be several sectors away from the damage when she did.

* * *

Lorca checked with Larsson three more times before the Buran left Spacedock. Yes, Lalana was on Earth. No, she had not boarded any more shuttles. Finally Larsson went, "Just call her and ask her yourself!"

"I can't trust she'll tell me the truth," said Lorca.

"That is your problem. I am going fishing. Goodbye." Lorca did not speak with Larsson again, but he did see Lalana on the Buran. More or less.

When the holocomm image flickered into view, it looked like no holocomm image was supposed to. The picture was technically correct, but the dimensions were all wrong. The image was folded in on itself, surfaces cutting through one another. Every aspect of depth and dimension was incorrect. There were also objects present from the room she was in, which should not have been visible on his end. Apparently the holocomm used non-optical sensors to process the surfaces of three-dimensional objects and discern between living and nonliving matter. An unexpected disaster on the designer's part.

"I can see you! It is like you are here!" exclaimed Lalana, and immediately swiped her tail through her image of him, which caused the holocomm emitters in the Buran's ready room to freak out and make it look like she was bisecting herself.

"I wish you could see what I see," he deadpanned, and keyed the panel at his desk to reduce her signal to two-dimensional. It was a relief to not have to look at that holocomm abomination.

"Have you left yet?"

"Almost. Two more hours. And you're at least two hours from the nearest shuttle pad, so..." She was on a beach in the Seychelles, this being what constituted Larsson's idea of an ideal fishing location. (It also explained why Larsson looked so red in their last communication.)

"Do I understand correctly that you are going to remind me of my involvement with Dr. Li always?"

It was a very fancy and not entirely apologetic way of referring to stowing away on the Triton. "Probably," he said.

"Then I accept this punishment, because it means we will continue talking."

"Just because you can't come with us doesn't mean I'm gonna ditch you completely. Partly, sure, but not completely."

Her head tilted. "What is 'ditch?'"

He smiled. Some things never changed.

* * *

There was one final ritual which needed to be observed before departure. A pile of fortune cookies sat on a bowl. It was always a risk, opening a fortune cookie on such an auspicious occasion. Even knowing every possible fortune, as he did, there was always a chance of a surprising encounter. His hand hovered over the bowl.

One cookie sat slightly on top of the pile, higher than the others, almost as if he was supposed to take it. He considered it a moment, then thought of the fortune on his bedstand and extracted the cookie below it.

"A change of heart will bring back what is lost."

He stared at it. _Sorry, Lalana_. Not even a fortune cookie was going to make him change his mind about civilian stowaways on a Federation starship, untraceable lului ones in particular.

Just for curiosity's sake, he opened the cookie that had been on top of the pile. "Others are inspired by your courage." _God damn it_ , he thought to himself. _That would have been perfect._ Sometimes it really was best to take what fate put in front of you.

He returned to the bridge and was greeted by a lot of familiar faces. Arzo at the science station, Benford at tactical, Russo on the comms and Carver at the helm. They were a good crew. He was glad to have had the chance to meet them before starting this mission. "Status report!" he barked.

"All systems are ready, sir," said the woman at ops, a lieutenant named Levy. She was a new addition to the roster. Modest service record, but some good personal remarks from her previous commanding officers. "Waiting on final clearance from Spacedock."

The difference in crew size was significant. The whole crew of the Triton could not have staffed the Buran, and given that Lorca had elected to bring roughly seventy-five percent of the Triton's people, there were now close to a hundred and fifty new faces on board, many of them young crewmen and cadets who would have many years of service to look forward to advancing through the ranks.

Lorca took over from Benford in the captain's chair and began reviewing the very final checks from each department. Engineering, weapons, medical, astrometrics, and of course, hydroponics. He could only imagine how much food Yoon had secreted away these past three days.

He had a new senior chief engineer, a Vulcan named Sural. He wondered what he had to do to get Starfleet to send him an engineer with a sense of humor for a change. Clearly, whatever he was doing with Cornwell wasn't having the desired effect.

Benford appeared at Lorca's elbow and said in a low voice, "What are you doing?"

Lorca glanced up. "What do you mean?"

"You're sitting."

"It's a new thing I'm trying out. Stand to keep them on their toes, sit to make them comfortable."

"Yeah, well, it's making _me_ uncomfortable."

Lorca chuckled and shook his head. "Back to your station, number one."

"Sir," said Russo. "Spacedock has cleared us for departure."

With a clap, Lorca hopped to his feet. "Mr. Russo! Open a shipwide channel. USS Buran. This is Captain Lorca. We have been cleared to depart and I have a few words. Yes, I know, everyone just loves a captain's speech at launch. But if you'll indulge me.

"Some of you, I've had the pleasure of serving with already. The rest, well, we'll be getting to know each other in the weeks and months to come. But you are all here because you are exemplary members of Starfleet. Each and every one of you is capable of amazing things as an individual, and together, we are capable of so much more.

"Each one of you has had your own path in joining Starfleet, and your own reasons for wanting to serve. So you all know what kind of ship you've signed on to, I'm going to tell you mine.

"Throughout our history, humanity has been a species of explorers. We walked, we sailed, and finally we flew. When we had conquered the ground beneath our feet and the air above our heads, we submerged ourselves in deep blue waves of that little planet down there. Our science, our stories, our very ethos as a species is built upon the need to satisfy our curiosity and reveal the unknown.

"In other words, we all have something in common, no matter what world you're from. We were all born too late to reach the unexplored by walking, sailing, or flying through the air.

"But we were all born just in time for this. To seek out strange new worlds, new life forms, and civilizations. Many of you know I've done all three, and before this journey end, it is my aim that every single one of you has done the same.

"There's a whole universe of stars out there waiting for us to boldly go where no one has gone before."

He let the words hands in the air a moment, just long enough for everyone to hopefully appreciate the promise of his speech. "Now, look alive, people. Final systems check. Communications!"

"All set, sir!" said Russo.

"Shields!"

Levy looked up from her console. "Operational! All systems online, captain."

"Sensors!"

"Online, sir," Arzo responded.

"Commander Benford. Weapons?"

"Locked and loaded, aye, cap'n!" Not actually loaded—they weren't in combat—but an exuberant turn of phrase that perfectly suited the spirit of this journey.

"Commander Sural. Warp drive?"

"All systems are nominal, captain." Leave it to a Vulcan.

"Navigation!"

"Course set, sir!"

"Take us out, Carver."

"Disengaging docking clamps. Impulse engines online."

"Incoming transmission, sir. Commodore Cornwell."

"Bring her up."

Cornwell appeared, a hologram standing in the fore of the bridge. "Just wanted to wish you and your crew the best of adventures, Captain."

"Thank you, Commodore. We'll do you proud." Cornwell vanished and Lorca took up his usual position at the fore of the bridge, the stars of the viewscreen beckoning him forward.

"We're clear of Spacedock, sir," said Carver. "Warp on your command."

Lorca smiled, admiring the sight of the stationary stars and savoring the feeling of power that came from the entire ship waiting with bated breath for his next order.

"Go."

The stars became strings of light.


	34. These Are the Voyages

A/N: I've been working on the next five chapters concurrently, thus the delay in posting this one, but prepare for a small burst of activity as I think I may actually hit my goal of where I want to be on Sunday...

* * *

2248.

It wasn't always easy to find the time for a live conversation, but they managed often enough. The late hours of the night when Lorca could afford the time to make a personal call became something of a ritual between them. Not every night, but enough of them.

"A beautiful, bouncing baby girl. Claire Anne Benford. Named after her grandmothers. I told them to name her Gabriella, but..." Lorca was in his quarters, a drink in hand, already showered and ready for bed. "Cassidy said I'd have to settle for being godfather, called it more honor than I deserved." He chuckled, but it was a shame. "Gabriella Benford" had a nice ring to it. Maybe he could convince the Benfords to try for another.

"I am still amazed how you humans can make an entire new human inside yourselves." Lalana was presently being displayed as a two-dimensional floating image of dubious quality. He could see the stars outside his window through her.

Lorca laughed. "The women can! It's not universal." His voice softened. "But it is amazing. I'm sure they'd love you to meet her. Where are you?"

"I am on a ship! We are going to a system called Babel. Commodore Cornwell told me they have there a diplomatic archive because the planet is used for meetings between many different species. I am hoping to learn more details about the intricacies of cultures with an extreme degree of difference interacting and Commodore Cornwell suggested that was a good place."

"Kat would know. She's been there lots of times." Lorca was familiar with Babel, of course, and hardly needed an explanation as to the planet's role in the Federation, but it was interesting to hear Lalana's take on the value of a trip there. Babel was a nice enough planet, but aside from a few museums and sites of historical significance, it was not a popular tourist destination. Lalana was calling her present travel endeavor "a survey of interspecies communication." In that context, Babel was a perfect choice.

"But aside from that, this ship does not have much to do aboard it, and the food is edible, but not fresh. They do not have enough space to grow plants like Da Hee does on your ships. I miss Da Hee. I spoke to her yesterday, but it is not the same to speak to someone across space as it is to stand near them." Her hands knocked sadly together. It was distressing to watch.

"That's... space travel for most people. A lot slower. But you'll be there soon enough. And even if we're not there with you in person, well, we have a saying on Earth: 'We're there in spirit.'"

"Spirit! That is something I have yet to understand. Is it because you don't have cellular awareness that you think you are somehow more than your body?"

That threw Lorca for a loop. "Don't think anyone's ever put it like that before." He took a swig of his drink. The question fell well outside his expertise.

"Well, as I have nothing to do, tell me about your day!"

"Started off with a bang. An EPS conduit on deck thirteen overloaded..." He launched into a recounting of the minor emergency caused by an ensign's misalignment of a circuit. "Sural was very patient about it, actually. Told the ensign that her mistake was a path to not making future mistakes."

"Sounds like a fortune cookie," Lalana observed.

"It does, doesn't it?" He thought a moment. "Do you even know what an EPS conduit is?"

"Of course! EPS conduits direct power from the warp drive to ship systems."

He looked at her, surprised.

Her hands spun. "I have been learning about ships so that one day I may have one of my own. I will be a captain, too. And I think I will name my ship 'Gabriella.'"

* * *

When there wasn't time to converse directly, they sent audio messages.

"Gotta cancel tonight, I'm beat. Spent the whole day corralling a Tellarite senator, my god, the arguing. Even you would've been hard-pressed to find something redeemable in that man."

In the morning, a response: "I have met some Tellarites! Did I not tell you? Ah, they were a most lovely species, despite everyone saying otherwise. It was very refreshing how they air their grievances and do not fester in their resentments. I had a great deal of fun finding things to argue with them about. And the insults! They thought mine were very creative and invited me to visit them. I am planning to go there soon, since it is not so far away."

He sent a quick message back: "I stand corrected. Only you would find something to love about Tellarites. What the hell is wrong with you!" But he was laughing as he said it, so he knew she would, too.

* * *

2249.

There were times when it was not fun to be a starship captain, not in the slightest, and this was one of them.

The Buran hung in orbit above a planet called Jindell. It was not a Federation planet, but owing to the seriousness of the viral outbreak currently ravaging its population, the Jindellians had appealed to the Federation for help.

All signs pointed to an engineered virus. It was airborne, highly contagious, and resisted every attempt at treatment the doctors and scientists threw at it. Both the Buran and a medical vessel, the USS Khorana, were providing what assistance they could from orbit while a group of volunteer Federation doctors and nurses worked to find a solution on the planet below. Despite every precaution, this effort had already proven fatal for one of their number, establishing in the process that the virus was capable of jumping between species.

The planet was under quarantine.

It had not escaped Lorca's attention that this problem would have been uniquely suited to the talents of Dr. Li. He could only hope that in the grand scheme of things, her absence did not prove to be a determining factor in the mission's outcome. He had given permission for Ek'Ez to contact Li, but apparently Li's stated interest in the good of the galaxy did not outweigh her spite for Captain Lorca, and she had yet to return Ek'Ez's calls.

Given the dire nature of the situation, there were plenty of people trying to break quarantine. So far, all had been convinced to turn back by the sheer size and strength of the Buran, but there was no way that would last.

"Shuttle launch, captain," said a crewman named Patel from the science station.

"Bring it onscreen and open a channel."

Lorca wasn't even giving the warnings any more. It was the same script, over and over. Russo leaned into his microphone. "Unidentified shuttlecraft, this the Buran. You are in violation of planetary quarantine. Please turn back immediately. Sir, response. Audio and video."

"Audio only," said Lorca, moving into position midway between Russo and the captain's chair.

A male voice said, "But we aren't sick!" It was a line they had heard many times before.

"Unfortunately, we have no way of guaranteeing your craft is free of the virus. We cannot risk a spread of the infection. You are endangering the lives of anyone you come into contact with. The doctors are hard at work, you just need to give them more time. The Federation is doing everything it can to assist. More medical personnel and supplies are on the way."

There was a second voice, female this time. The panic and terror was palpable. "We'll die if we stay down there! Please, we have three children!"

"I repeat, you must turn back. This is a planetary quarantine."

"Contact the Jindellian fleet and inform them of our situation," Lorca ordered Levy.

"The nearest vessel is four minutes out."

The Jindellians did not have much of a fleet, but what they did have was working hard to contain similar incidents across the planet. Unfortunately, a portion of the Jindellian military had already succumbed to the outbreak, and their resources were spread thin.

"Sir, they're powering up engines."

Shit. "Tractor them."

"Out of range," reported Levy.

Patel's eyes widened. At that altitude, the methogenic particles present in Jindell's atmosphere could ignite.

Which the Jindellian family knew, because everyone on Jindell knew their atmosphere was potentially explosive. Their early space program had been a series of unmitigated disasters until they had perfected an inner-atmospheric propulsion system which could safely move them away from the explosive layers to an altitude where more traditionally-powered engine designs could be used.

It was also why the Buran could risk going no lower, and what the shuttle was counting on as their ticket to escape. At that altitude, there was a chance their launch would be successful.

Disabling the shuttle was not an option. Weapons were just as likely to ignite the particles, assuming they could even hit the shuttle with a blast that took down its shields and engines without destroying it.

They had a last resort protocol precisely for this sort of situation. "Lock on transporters and—"

There was an explosion.

It was so small and far away that it barely registered on the Buran in a physical sense, but everyone on the bridge felt it.

The total elapsed time between the announcement that they were powering engines in the lower atmosphere and the order to beam them out was four seconds.

"Lock on to any debris you can and beam it into space." The Jindellians would be monitoring the debris field from below, and their system for detecting and responding to impacts was quite advanced, but the Buran would still do everything it could to lessen the damage to the world below. "Russo, call for fresh crew."

"Aye, sir."

Without another word, Lorca headed into the ready room. The door closed behind him. He waited two seconds, then kicked the table with all of his might and let out a furious yell that was definitely audible on the bridge. He received a satisfying jolt of pain that shot up his leg and left him grimacing and balancing on one foot.

The door chimed. "What!" he barked, and Morita entered. She had been at the tactical station.

Whatever her reason for entering, she took one look at the way he was almost doubled over and said, "Let me take a look."

"I'm fine," he growled.

"It's me or sickbay."

He sat down in Benford's chair and winced as Morita removed his boot and sock. He'd jammed his foot rather severely. Ironically, the toe guard built into the boots meant his toes were the one part that didn't hurt. Instead, the impact had been transferred up into the upper part of his foot, to the tarsals and metatarsals.

She didn't have any equipment, but what she did have were hands well-versed in foot anatomy. He had not forgotten that one time on the Gentonian ship when she'd done this same thing for a very different reason: to get him to fall asleep so she could do the same.

Morita was gentle and careful, testing each spot for tenderness and looking for any signs of a fracture. "I think you have a stress fracture," she concluded. "I'll walk you down."

"I'll take the transporter, spare myself the embarrassment," he said bitterly.

She knew better than to try and offer any sort of words of consolation. "All right, sir. I'll let the doctor know to expect you." She stood to leave.

"Reiko?"

She paused, looked back towards him, and discovered he was looking away. "I'm glad Benford wasn't up here."

She put a hand on his shoulder, squeezed lightly, and left.

He sat alone in his ready room for some minutes, staring out the window, relieved the view was of the stars and not the planet. Then he reached down and carefully put his sock and shoe back on. When he tested his weight, it hurt, but nothing he couldn't handle.

He walked out of the ready room as if nothing was wrong and sat down in the captain's chair with an entirely new bridge crew around him.

* * *

2250.

They were a mess of motion beneath the sheets when the comms beeped. "Shit," said Lorca.

"Answer it, I'll wait."

"It'll keep," he said, and pressed down to kiss her again.

The comm beeped again. "It could be important!" said Carver. There was no denying the incoming communication had importance, but if it had been in the sense of an impending emergency, a voice would have cut in on an emergency override.

Lorca heaved himself off of Carver. "I promise you'll regret this. Audio only," he said to the computer. "Go ahead."

"Good evening, captain! ... Why is there no image?"

Carver blinked. Even after more than a year, there was no mistaking that voice.

"Evening, Lalana. Seems you've caught me out."

"You are not in?"

Irresistible, that setup. Lorca glanced at Carver. "Most decidedly not." He pressed his fist against his mouth to suppress the devilish delight threatening to bubble over into laughter.

"What are you doing, Hayliel? I can hear your face laughing." This was a slight conflagration of two observations on her part. First, his tone of voice clearly indicated a familiar degree of irreverence, and second, the faint sound of staccato breathing through his nose coupled with the tiniest _snerk_.

There was another setup in her second question, but for once in his life, he resisted. Mostly because it wasn't up to his exacting standards and Carver already looked faintly mortified. He had said she'd regret it. "I'm with Maria."

"Oh! How lovely! Hello, Maria. Are you enjoying your time with the captain?"

Carver seemed to be having slightly less fun than before, clutching the sheets over her chest as if she feared the holocomms were going to turn on. "...Yes?"

"That is lovely to hear! If I may suggest, according to my friend Sollis on Risa..." What followed was an entirely graphic and fairly revealing set of suggestions that Lorca selfishly allowed to continue for much longer than he should have because there was no denying Sollis was an expert in such matters, and while Carver hardly needed instruction, there were a few elements of advice Lorca wouldn't mind having repeat performance of if Carver was up for it. There were also a few details in there Lalana could not possibly have gotten from Sollis. "I hope that is of use to you!"

Over the course of this, Carver listened with alternating moments of shock and curiosity. She was an excellent foil for Lorca despite their age difference. She had an easygoing, adventurous, and generous nature, and seemed at no risk of actual attachment. "That was actually informative," remarked Carver.

"Yes, well, it is an interest of mine," said Lalana. "Because human reproduction is so very different from lului."

 _You liar_ , thought Lorca with a smile.

* * *

2251.

Holocomms, when working properly, were an excellent method of communication. Lorca was at present consulting with Captain Georgiou for her expertise on a group of colonies that had jurisdiction over a significant set of mineral-rich asteroids and never seemed to agree on who precisely had the rights to mine what minerals from various rocks. The Buran had been dispatched to mediate.

"You should talk to Minister Hargrave on the Milan colony. I have found him willing to compromise if approached through back channels. Or should I say, play ball?" She was watching with open amusement as Lorca tossed the foam ball against the window in his ready room and caught it repeatedly.

He caught the ball again and held it up. "This doesn't bother you, does it?" He could only imagine what it looked like on the other end of the holocomm. Was her emitter showing him bouncing a ball off of nothing? Or had it positioned him in such a way that he was hitting walls on two ships? Holocomms were designed to provide contextual positioning so that subjects did not appear to be sitting on air or leaning against nothing.

"Not at all. It's important to keep your reflexes sharp. You never know when you will need them."

There was a comm ping. Lorca straightened in alert, but the source of the noise was the Shenzhou. It was shortly followed by the identifier, "Saru to Captain Georgiou."

The comms pinged again. Georgiou sighed and shook her head. "If you will excuse me a moment, Gabriel, I must mediate a dispute between two members of my crew." (She knew it was a dispute, because it was always a dispute when she assigned them to work together.) "Yes, Mr. Saru."

He couldn't see the offenders, but he could hear them.

"Captain, I regret to inform you that we have reached an impasse and are unable to proceed with our analysis of the anomaly at present."

To her credit, Georgiou was entirely unphased by this announcement. "What seems to be the problem?" Both voices immediately launched into intense debate.

"Captain, a Folrian sort is the most efficient way to sort all of the data as quickly as possible!"

"Yes, but a Lyelin sort will allow us to interpret that data as we go!"

"The sooner we have all of the data compiled, the sooner we can run a meta-analysis on the anomaly as a whole."

"If we wait for a meta-analysis, we will lose out on valuable time when we could be acting on any initial analyses to further our understanding of the anomaly right now."

Georgiou was calm and patient. "Michael. Saru." Lorca got the impression this was not the first time Georgiou had intervened in an argument between the two. "In the time that you have used to argue over your methods, you could have started already."

He couldn't see the faces, but he could imagine their expressions – especially the Kelpien's. He recalled that look of permanent bewilderment from their brief encounter two years before when Saru had beamed over to the Triton and met Lalana.

"I am very disappointed in you both," continued Georgiou. "Please decide which method you are going to use and begin your assignment."

They responded almost in unison, their voices tripping over each other in discomfort: "Yes, captain."

Georgiou closed her eyes and took a deep breath. It was her way of clearing the discourse from her present state of mind so they could resume their discussion about the colonies.

"Sounds like you've got your hands full over there with those two."

Georgiou smiled. "It is a labor of love."

* * *

2252.

"Captain, incoming transmission. It's a civilian ship, the Gabriella."

Lorca clapped his hands, giving everyone else on the bridge a start. "I'll take it in my ready room." He vaulted across the bridge.

She appeared under a faintly reddish light. "Hello, captain!"

"And hello, captain!" He grinned at her and she clicked her tongue in delight. "I can't believe you actually did it. You went and got your own ship."

"Now, I may go anywhere you go, and many places you cannot. If I follow you, you cannot stop me."

"Lalana." He fixed her with a look of immense disapproval. "Do _not_ follow the Buran around. Do you hear me? Under no circumstances are you allowed to do that. This is a Federation starship, we are not on a pleasure cruise."

She started clicking her tongue rapidly. "As if you are the most interesting thing in space! That is so funny! Oh, Gabriel, you are very dear to me, but I have many more stars to see first before I can catch up to you."


	35. The Island of Misfit Toys

2253.

"Five years in space, do you never take a break?" He was overdue. "Come visit Risa with me!"

She was on Nausicaa. He was in the vicinity of Trill. Risa was almost a reasonable midway point. "If it'll get you off Nausicaa," he sighed. The planet was famously violent, constantly beset by turmoil, and home to the ill-tempered Nausicaans. If Nausicaans had a bad reputation in the quadrant, it was probably because it seemed like fully half of them were engaged in piracy. Despite this, Lorca had been unable to dissuade Lalana as to the value of Nausicaa as a tourism destination.

"Then that is a yes?"

He raised his hands. "It's not a no! I have to put in a request and see what Starfleet says."

"It has been five years since you were last on Risa. While that is not very long to me, surely that is too long for you." Some part of her was aware that, whatever time she had with him, it was never going to be as much as she would like.

"I have half an idea that Katrina wouldn't mind if I never went back."

"Yes, well, you are the one who told me it is not a proper Risa vacation unless you are getting in trouble."

He snorted. "That is a known fact. Now please, tell me you're going to leave Nausicaa?"

"Ah, but it is so interesting! They have so many things they have collected from so many different species and planets..."

 _Collected?_ Lorca slouched over his desk his desk so his elbow was touching the table and leaned his head on his hand. He sighed softly. Only Lalana could have such a positive view of piracy.

* * *

"I think it's a very good idea," said Cornwell when he mentioned the prospect of a proper vacation, along with a shipwide systems check and overhaul to restore the Buran to as pristine a condition as possible after five long years in space and countless misadventures. She was sitting in her new office addressing a hologram of Lorca that stood midway between her desk and the door. Normally, Lorca wasn't self-aware enough to know when to take a break from the constant adventures. This potentially signified a positive step forward for him. "Can I expect you on Earth?"

Lorca was entirely noncommittal in his response. "Maybe for a few days." He had intentionally left out any mention of a destination in the vain hope she would not ask.

Cornwell gave him a look. "You're not going to Risa," she said in disbelief.

"And what if I am? Are you revoking my leave?"

She sighed. "I'm just concerned about you. You fly around like there's no end in sight, and when you finally do take a break, you decide to go to Risa for another deranged sex bender, as if this isn't a clear and destructive cycle with you."

Lorca's mouth fell open in shock. "What!?"

"Gabriel, last time you were on Risa, I found you shacking up with a local couple after you left the hotel where you were staying with your chief engineer. Are you denying it?"

Lorca crossed his arms and chewed his lip as Cornwell admonished him. "That was five years ago," he countered. "I'm seeing someone now."

"Really? And who would this lucky woman be?"

He almost said Carver, realized what a mistake that admission would be, and decided not to say anything. Unfortunately, this was not a tactic that had ever worked with Cornwell, of all people, whose professional mission it was to get people to talk.

"Yes," said Cornwell after ten seconds of silence, "this is a mature response to this question."

Her tactic worked. "She's a captain," he admitted. "Who values her privacy."

"A captain? A Starfleet captain?"

He remained reticent, but said after a moment, "No."

"Is it serious?"

"Absolutely not. She requested we go to Risa. Wasn't even my idea. Now if you're asking me if I'll stop by and see you on the way, then, yes. If you insist." He seemed genuinely annoyed until his tone abruptly lightened and he said, "I mean, I haven't gotten the chance to properly congratulate you on your promotion yet, admiral. I hear your office has quite a view." He smirked entirely too suggestively in a way that made it clear he had little interest in the geography and architecture visible from her window.

"You are way out of line, captain."

"And yet, I'm not hearing a 'no,'" said Lorca playfully.

"Oh yes you are," said Cornwell, equally glib as she terminated the connection. This was one bender she had no intention of participating in. It was bad enough she'd signed off on it, not to mention the fact she'd unleashed this monster of a man onto the universe in the first place by giving him command of a starship. Even if he was brilliant, and funny, and good at it.

No, not good at it, she corrected herself. He was great, and that wasn't in spite of his other qualities, but because of them. His recklessness and creativity showed him options other captains would never even dream of. His tendency to keep his most important cards close to his chest and generate justifications after the fact gave him the freedom to take action quickly and decisively in the moment, and then defend his actions in the aftermath. He always felt there was a way to wriggle out of trouble even when he was backed into impossible corners, which meant he never gave up. It all combined to make one hell of a captain.

Cornwell smiled and looked out at the sparkle of sunlight on the waves. Maybe he was a monster, but he was the best monster imaginable, and she was proud of him.

* * *

The salt sea air was as sweet as ever. Lorca stood at a seawall overlooking a small bay near Sollis and Caxus's house, enjoying the fresh air and the touch of breeze across his hair. It was as perfect a day as you could hope for, because every day was a perfect day on Risa. The authorities would have it no other way.

His patterned dark blue short-sleeve shirt and white shorts clearly marked him out as starship crew. There was no mistaking the skin tone of someone who lived and worked in space with the rich tans of the locals and natives. To anyone who paid attention to such things, his bearing also gave him away as Starfleet, but aside from that, he was essentially anonymous. There would be no random run-ins with members of his crew on this vacation.

When he closed his eyes, he could feel the early afternoon sun against his eyelids and hear the gentle lapping of the waves against the shore. Birds called in the distance. Behind him, the sounds of people talking, chattering, laughing. Risa was beautiful even without the view.

When he opened his eyes, Lalana was six inches away from his face. He let out a startled yell and jumped back, erupting into laughter as she bounced down from the wall and clicked exuberantly. "You scared me, Lalana!"

She was wearing a red scarf wrap that heavily contrasted with the familiar shade of grey-blue. "I would say that was not my intention, but it entirely was! And that is Captain Lalana to you!"

He laughed again. "Captain Lalana." He stood looking at her a moment, just smiling. "It's been entirely too long. Shall we?" He offered his arm and she stretched up alongside him.

They made quite the unusual pair strolling through the market. They lingered at a fruit stand, selected a quantity of colorful offerings from across the quadrant, then wandered down to the beach and ate them at the shore. "Now this," said Lorca, "is a peach. The most important fruit in the galaxy, because this is the fruit of the state of Georgia." It was delicious and the juices ran down his chin when he bit into it. Lalana wiped the juice away with her tail, as they hadn't any napkins. She was more effective than a napkin by several orders of magnitude. Then she tried to eat the pit, of course, even though he had the vague sense she knew not to eat it and was only pretending she would for nostalgia's sake.

"Hold on to the pit and plant it, you might get a tree," he advised her.

"My ship does not have the space for a tree," she said, which was a fact. The Gabriella was essentially a small room strapped to a warp drive. It was not well-armored and had no weapons, but it went at an absolute clip, even compared to a Federation starship.

He squinted up at the sun, guessing at the passage of time. "We should probably go check in."

"Swim first! We are right next to the ocean. How can we not?"

"Fine," he said. "But I'm not going all the way in." There were plenty of beaches on Risa where tearing off clothes was allowed and even encouraged, but this was a public beach in a commercial area. Lalana could get away with taking off her scarf but there was very little chance Lorca could do the same without being accosted by someone in authority. That was not the kind of trouble he intended for this particular vacation.

He went in until the water lapped at the bottom of his shorts and held Lalana's scarf for her as she darted through the water. She surfaced after a moment with a beautiful shell held aloft in her tail.

"You know they seed those on the beach for tourists to find," he said.

"That does not mean it is not beautiful."

"It's probably not even from Risa."

"I will find a shell so beautiful even you are impressed by it," she declared, and disappeared under the water.

Lorca waited. And waited. And waited. She did not need to breathe, but he began to wonder if something had happened to her. The waters were supposed to be safe, but what if she had tried to pry loose a shell and knocked something over and pinned herself to the ocean floor? He walked deeper into the water. "Lalana?" He called her name again, louder this time.

He debated returning to shore to wait. Then he took a deep breath and ducked underwater for a look. He did not see her, but he could see where the shallow shelf of the beach fell away into deeper ocean up ahead in the distance. She must have gone off the deep end, literally. He stood back up and sighed. He was now well and thoroughly wet. _In for a penny, in for a pound_ , he thought to himself, and headed further out.

The water was chest-deep when he finally caught sight of her and figured out what was going on. The shell she was dragging was absolutely massive—almost as big as she was. It was round and flat, like a scallop, and almost two and a half feet across, with striations of purple and white.

He swam out to meet her and help her drag the shell in. "You've got to be kidding me," he said when they finally got it out of the water.

"Is it not beautiful? Are you not impressed?"

Other tourists were gathering around to admire the find. "Nice!" said one, snapping a picture of it. "Never seen one that big before."

Lalana noted the disparity between the reactions of the other tourists and Lorca, who was standing wet and bedraggled next to the shell. "You are not impressed," she said. "I will go get another."

"I'm impressed!" he exclaimed, and started laughing. "Please can we check in now?"

* * *

They could not check in. "We are so sorry, we tried to contact you twenty minutes ago." Twenty minutes ago, Lorca had been chest-deep in seawater, communicator submerged in his pocket. "Due to an infestation of Melvaran mud fleas, we have been forced to close off part of the hotel. The infestation is perfectly contained and poses no danger, but guests have been forced to relocate to other facilities. I'll find you other accommodations right now."

Lorca glanced down at Lalana. She could probably make a feast of those mud fleas. Likely that was how the infestation began in the first place: someone had forgotten to properly seal off a smuggled snack. "So what are the options?"

"Well, the Gran Terrace has a lovely sunset view suite..."

Gran Terrace was one of the luxury towers two islands over. "We'd rather stay on this island," said Lorca. Since Lalana could not simply beam between islands like everyone else, moving to another island would be an inconvenience when it came to visiting Sollis and Caxus. The couple were as much Lalana's friends as Lorca's at this point.

"Unfortunately, there are no rooms available." The clerk seemed genuinely distressed at being unable to help them.

"We can stay with Sollis and Caxus," said Lalana. "They did offer."

"I guess we'll have to. For tonight, at least. Keep our reservation active and let us know when the rooms open back up." Lorca rapped his knuckles twice on the hotel clerk's counter and they left.

The walk to Sollis and Caxus's house was uneventful, even with the giant shell under Lorca's arm. Despite the unfortunate circumstance, the couple were more than pleased to welcome them both when they heard what had happened. Sollis made tea (which Lorca was this time obliged to actually drink) and they relaxed on the living room couches.

"You would think for an emergency like that they would consider opening up the rooms at the Winowa," said Sollis. "But some traditions are simply too strong to make an exception."

"The Winowa?"

"It's the best hotel on the planet," said Caxus.

Sollis smiled. "Unfortunately you can only stay there once in your lifetime."

"A second time would be bad luck." Caxus and Sollis shared a knowing look.

"What the hell does that mean?" asked Lorca. When Sollis explained, Lorca looked at Lalana with a raised eyebrow. "I mean..."

Lalana was sitting on the couch with her haunches bunched and her tail flicking mischievously. She immediately gleaned what Lorca meant. She fixed her unblinking eyes on Sollis and Caxus and intoned with complete seriousness, "Did you know lului share a psychic bond which can connect their consciousnesses across the cosmos?"

Lorca snorted in laughter and chuckled. Maybe lului weren't psychic, but she'd clearly read his mind. Game on.


	36. She's Like a Rainbow

The registrar stared at them. Certainly they were unlike any couple he had ever seen before, and he had seen thousands upon thousands of couples. He had seen couples from every corner of the known universe, and occasionally some that seemed to have come from beyond, and no combination unnerved him quite as much as this.

He swallowed and stared down at the registry and accompanying certificate. Normally, people scheduled these appointments weeks and months in advance and planned an accompanying ceremony. These two had just walked off the street with a pair of witnesses. The rest of the Winowa's chapel was otherwise empty. It was a beautiful chapel: carved from natural stone with bone-white columns, fresh flowers along the rows of chairs, and a beautiful sculpture of a Risian man and woman intertwined set behind the altar.

Lorca and Lalana did almost sort of look the part. Lorca's clothes from before had been stiff with sea salt, so he'd changed into a polo shirt, dinner jacket, and pants. Lalana had borrowed a lace table runner from Sollis and turned it into a very fetching veil-shawl-cowl combination which was rendered largely moot by the additional modification of turning herself white, too.

"And then we can get a room?" asked Lorca.

The registrar looked over at Sollis and Caxus. Occasionally tourists would wander in and not understand the importance and function of the Winowa, but there was no way two native Risians misunderstood the sanctity of the institution. Maybe they had been trying to be hospitable and it had gotten out of hand. "You understand this is a once-in-a-lifetime, legally binding marriage?"

"Yep," said Lorca, with a level of irreverence that would not have seemed out of place at the circus he and Lalana seemed to have escaped from.

Lalana stretched up and grabbed hold of the edge of the registrar's lectern. "You have to let us get married. We will report you to the authorities if you don't! We have two witnesses and we have traveled very far to do this! I have come all the way from the Delta Quadrant!"

"That she has," said Lorca.

"And if you do not marry us, my people will come from the Delta Quadrant and invade your planet and destroy your entire Federation! A slight against me is a slight against the entire Lului Consortium of Star Warriors!"

Lorca almost burst out laughing and quickly started coughing to cover it up. "Also, I'm dying. Three months to live. That's why we couldn't plan this in advance."

"My poor darling!" trilled Lalana, curling her tail around Lorca's arm. "He is so sick, I know he tries to put on a brave face, but inside his cells are being eaten alive! Can you not see his pain?" Lorca coughed three more times.

The registrar looked again at Sollis and Caxus. Sollis had her hand over her mouth and Caxus was standing stock-still with his eyes fixed on a point somewhere off in the imaginary distance.

Lalana unhooked her tail from Lorca's arm and smacked it against the lectern twice as she said. "Marry us! Now! Or I'm calling the authorities! Also now!" Lorca abruptly started coughing again.

The registrar hesitated. Lorca saw his chance. He stopped coughing and went, "Look, this goes one of two ways. First way is you marry us, give us a room, and everyone gets what they want. The second, well, you don't marry us, we make a few angry calls to the tourism bureau, and the whole quadrant finds you refused to marry a dying man and the only alien of her species for fifty thousand light years. We only came here because we heard this was the most important place two people could get married. And when you only have three months left to live, you may as well do it right."

"Of course," said the registrar quickly, beginning to worry this wasn't some form of elaborate ruse. It might be the strangest circumstances he had ever encountered, but that didn't make it untrue. The front desk had sent them into the chapel, after all. And nothing on Risa was more important than hospitality. He hardly wanted them to come away with the impression that the Winowa, of all the hotels on Risa, was inhospitable. It would ruin their reputation. "I just need your names."

Lalana bounced slightly in excitement. "Eleanor!"

"How should that be spelled?" He looked at Lorca, figuring a Delta Quadrant alien wouldn't know an Alpha Quadrant alphabet, but Lalana answered.

"The usual way, of course. E-L-E-A-N-O-R."

The registrar immediately recognized it as a regular Earth name because he had encountered it before. "And the rest of your name?"

"That is my entire name."

Well, thought the registrar, there were instances of phonetically similar names appearing across alien cultures. It must simply be a case of coincidental convenience. "And your name?"

"Hayliel Lorla," Lorca said smugly. "Spelled exactly how it sounds."

The registrar looked at Sollis and Caxus for help. Both were now looking away, totally ignoring the unfolding scene. The registrar looked back down at the certificate. This was definitely a mistake. The alien had a human name and the human had an alien name. "Hey-li-ell Lor-la..."

"Yep, you got it," said Lorca, not even bothering to look down at what the registrar had written. (It turned out to be "Heyliell Lorla," which was close enough.) The registrar took down Sollis and Caxus's names and then all four signed the document, Lalana with Lorca's help. It was really a pretty bit of paper, decorated in fancy Risian script with an English translation of the Risian marriage vows.

The registrar affixed a seal to the bottom of the document. "Do you want any official words? Human or Risian or..." The poor registrar had no idea what to do with Lalana's "Consortium of Star Warriors."

"Human words please!" said Lalana enthusiastically.

It was a relief to the registrar, because he hardly wanted to perform this sham ceremony in Risian. He went with the nondenominational version, since Lorca did not clarify otherwise. "Please face each other. Do you... Hayliel Lorla... take this... woman... to be your wife, to have and to hold, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, from this day forth, until death do you part?"

As if to add insult to injury, Lorca went, "Yep."

"And do you, Eleanor, take this man... Hayliel..." The registrar rattled off the list. "...until death do you part?"

"I do not think there are enough things on the list. I should also like for this to include 'on planets and in space, in starships and underwater, when in uniform and without clothes, whether or not there are stars overhead, when at the dinner table with friends, even in hibernation—"

"Hey!" Lorca said sharply. "Just say 'I do!'"

"I do."

The registrar looked on the verge of crying from the stress. "I now pronounce you man and wife, you may kiss the bride," he rattled off, and closed his eyes. When he opened them again, both Lorca and Lalana had resumed their previous positions of leaning on his lectern and staring directly at him.

"So, which way to our room?"

The registrar swallowed. "I just need your Federation IDs to register this union to the official interplanetary database."

"Don't have one," said Lalana, which was an easily sellable lie based on the lies told previously.

"I renounced my Federation citizenship when I joined the Lului Consortium of Star Warriors," declared Lorca. Behind him, Sollis squeaked and quickly threw her hand back over her mouth.

"But do not worry, that paper document will be enough to have the marriage recognized by my people," offered Lalana. "We are returning to the Delta Quadrant after this. On my spaceship, which can travel fifty thousand light years in the time it would take you to sing a song. A long song, but a song all the same. I am hopeful that my people will be able to find a way to save my husband's life."

"But traveling in your ship is what made me sick in the first place!" said Lorca with a grin.

"Yes, well, maybe this time it will make you un-sick."

"Maybe!" agreed Lorca wholeheartedly, chuckling. Then he fake-coughed a few times. Because he was dying.

The registrar reluctantly handed them their marriage certificate. "The front desk will be happy to assist you with your rooms and luggage." As they walked away, he called after them in a pitiful voice, "Please enjoy your stay!"

* * *

They bid goodnight to Caxus and Sollis at the entrance to the lift. "I can't believe you did that," said Sollis, still shocked. "I can't believe we let you do that. I can't believe we helped you do that!"

Caxus was laughing, taking this better than Sollis. "Congratulations?" he offered.

"That is how you get a hotel room," said Lorca, smug as ever.

"And how you get a marriage which is only legally binding on Risa," added Lalana. "So now I can still marry Einar on Earth."

All the smugness dropped away. Lorca's expression began to resemble the registrar's. Lalana started clicking her tongue, then reached over with a hand and tugged on the leg of his pants. Literally pulling his leg. "Your face! Your face!" she said, and clicked some more. Lorca groaned.

"See? It's not fun when you're on the receiving end!" said Sollis. "That poor man..."

"I'm sure he'll be okay," said Caxus, patting Sollis on the back.

Lorca hated to see Sollis this upset over their little joke. "Sollis, I was never going to get married, so if anything, you've given me a gift I wouldn't have gotten otherwise. A chance to experience this." He threw his hands wide, indicating the hotel and everything in general.

"Yes, and because of you, now I can finally tell Da Hee that I managed to keep Gabriel."

Dim recognition flitted across Lorca's face. "Keep me?"

"Do you not remember? At dinner on the Triton! Da Hee said you were a keeper, and I said I would like to keep you, and now I have!"

Lorca raised his eyebrows, looked at Sollis and Caxus, and said, "I'm not sure, but I think I may have just been played." Lalana clicked her tongue. If it had been a con, it had certainly been a long one.

Lorca and Lalana stepped into the lift. The doors closed. They were alone. After two seconds of silence, Lorca started convulsing with laughter. He laughed so hard, tears came to his eyes. Lalana clicked merrily along as she shifted back to her usual grey-blue.

"For the record," he said as the lift doors opened, "I won."

Lalana stopped clicking. "How do you think that? Victory was clearly mine!"

"I got him to give us the certificate. That got us the room."

"Yes, but all you claimed to be was dying. I claimed to be from the Delta Quadrant! That is a much bigger lie."

"Not in your case it's not." Most people had never seen a lului and wouldn't know if one came from the Delta Quadrant or the unexplored system next door.

"I said my spaceship could travel fifty thousand light years on a song."

"Maybe, but that was after we signed the paper, and I'm the one who said fifty thousand in the first place." Lorca hit the door control.

The suite beyond was incredible. Flowers cascading across the room, windows carved within the curves of natural stone formations, a fountain set into the stone, live plants, curtains stretching floor to ceiling, and a curved bed that could probably fit six people and somehow gave the impression of a giant cocoon. The view outside held the last purple hues of the sunset and looked out onto a hidden lagoon. There was a balcony, a full bar, and cushions for sitting or laying in almost any place or position a newlywed couple might want to try.

"Now this is an effective joke!" he declared.

"A practical joke!" she corrected him, to which he said:

"Practical _and_ effective." They laughed together.

* * *

The room was positioned more for sunsets than sunrises, which was perfect for sleeping in, but even so far removed from the rigors and routine of a starship, Lorca still woke early and went for a run. Lalana went with him. It was nice to see the island in the early morning before most of it was awake. It was only when they got back to the room that Lorca realized something was different.

"Hang on. Weren't there flowers here yesterday?" He pointed to a spot on the wall.

"Yes, they were delicious," said Lalana. "I ate them while you were asleep."

Laughing, he scooped her up and swung her onto the bed, flopping down beside her. "God it's good to actually be in the same room with you again. Seems like it's been forever."

She half-climbed onto him, resting her head on his chest. "To me, it feels like yesterday." She vibrated slightly. There was something oddly comforting about it, like a cat's purr. "Do you remember the first time we were on Risa?"

"I don't think I can forget." That had been a spectacularly memorable trip in about twelve different ways, six of them not suited for polite company, two of them probably illegal on most worlds.

Her tail flopped onto his hair and her filaments began twirling through. "When you said what you said, it made me so happy."

He looked down at her, curious. He had said a lot of things. "Remind me, what'd I say?"

"That you understood how I felt, wanting to run to the stars, because you did, too."

Lorca sniffed in amusement. The goodbye, of course. How much easier it would have been if the goodbye had actually been a goodbye and not a preface to things he would rather forget. "Of course. We're the same that way. Who wouldn't want to run out there and see everything there is to see?

She tilted her head against his shirt and said, "Only my entire species."

"Besides them." There was no denying Lalana's people were the worst. The Gorn skeleton was still taking up space in cold storage on Earth because Lorca had yet to find a way to get rid of it that didn't entail bumping up against questions or regulations. "I never asked you. What did you and Umale talk about at... Deepwater Hive?" The name had stuck with him all these years.

"We did not speak about anything because I did not go."

He propped himself up partway. "I thought you got the worms there?"

"Oh dear me," she said, a phrase she had picked up from an elderly human woman during a spaceflight. "You really do not understand the geography of Luluan. Deepwater Hive is... it is as deep as the waters go. On your world, it would be the equivalent of the Mariana Trench. It is very warm there, and it is where all the most important lului live. To keep them safe, you understand. It is our fortress. I wish you could see it. There are things down there that are like nothing on any other worlds. The twists and textures of the corridors, hidden pockets of treasures collected over the millennia. A record of fossils extending back to the earliest days of life on our world. Clusters of polyps in every color you can imagine and some you cannot. Curves worn smooth by years of travel, so when you pass through them, it is like slipping past time. The pressure of the water, though, it would crush your skull. And your skin would burn and boil. And also I think you would get stuck in the passageways that lead to it, as they are very narrow, and then you would be eaten by milulae, assuming of course that you did not drown first..."

It had been an enthralling story of wonders until she started describing all the reasons why he could not go. "Please stop telling me how I'd die. It is entirely unsexy."

She perked up, pushing upward with her arms so it looked like she was doing the lului version of a push-up on top of him. "Then shall we do something else?"

"What did you have in mind?"

"Media Center! Play _God Only Knows_ by the Beach Boys on repeat!"

"No!" he exclaimed in mock horror, because this was her favorite song, and she listened to it almost incessantly.

"Only five loops," she promised.

" _I may not always love you_ ," it began.

"Why do you love this song so much?" he sighed. It had always seemed kind of hokey to him, with its blaring horn intro, periodic musical flourishes, and vocal harmonies.

She relaxed against him again. "Because, it says a truth I feel. And it's pretty how the voices come together."

He listened to the lyrics with more of an ear the second playthrough, and the third. There was a definite sense of bittersweetness to it. Between "I may not always love you" and "if you should ever leave me," the only sentiment he could think she was ruminating on was the difference in lifespans, and in that case, what to think of the line "what good would living do me?"

"When you say it's a truth... is this about killing yourself?"

Lalana batted his face with her tail in admonishment. "Why must you make this song about death? Is that what it means to be human, to live such a short life that you think always of dying? To me, the song is saying the opposite. To me, it is about how you gave me the stars, and so long as the stars are there, then you are there, too."

After the fifth play, she stopped it as promised. They lay in silence for a minute. Then she said, "It is not the song that I love. It is you."

The words "I'm sorry, I don't feel the same" drifted through Lorca's head not because they were true, but because that was how he normally responded to romantic confessions. Instead he had the media center play some more music.

Something lingered in his mind. He hadn't given her the stars, not really. But he could fix that.

* * *

2254.

It was one of the most stunning things he had ever seen. A little proplyd star, yellow as a citrine, with a beautiful disk the color of spring green grass spread out around it.

"And it doesn't have a name?"

"None in our systems. It is designated IPD36397J-α in our star charts."

"We'll have to fix that," declared Lorca.

It had taken some doing to locate a star that matched his specifications. Weeks of scouring the charts and databases to find a candidate that was both the right color and within a region of space they might reasonably be expected to travel to.

Part of the reason it was so hard was that there was no such thing as a green star. Stars could be blue, yellow, red, or orange. They were never green or purple. The trick was to find one with quantities of sulfur or methane around it, giving rise to the impression it was green. The fact that this was a proplyd star in addition to possessing the correct combination of elements was pure icing on the cake.

"All right, I'm naming it. Horaiz. Like 'horizon,'" Lorca said, keying in the spelling he had chosen. It also corresponded to a human surname, for double indemnity.

"Horaiz," remarked Carver. "I like it."

Lorca smiled, because while it didn't look like much written down, you could hear it when it was spoken, if you knew what to listen for. "Do me a favor, Carver. Send these coordinates over to the Gabriella."

"Aye, sir."


	37. Walking in Space

A/N: Everything is fluffy until it's not. We tell the biggest lies to ourselves.

* * *

2255.

"Anything, Arzo?"

"Negative, sir."

"If I didn't know any better, I'd think we were dealing with lului." They were standing in the middle of a town square market. There were stalls of fruits, vegetables, cloth, rugs, housewares, virtually everything imaginable. Beautiful buildings with curved, ribbed architecture rose around them. The only thing missing was the people.

"I cannot deny the similarities," said Arzo. "I suspect that is why they assigned us. Several other ships have attempted to locate this planet already without success."

"So we're the 'species in hiding' specialists," sighed Lorca, looking around. He ran his fingers across a piece of grey-blue cloth flecked with bits of white and yellow. "I mean, we're good at it, apparently. Two for two now."

It had taken the better part of three months to track the planet's location. Zero radio signals, no satellites, and fleeting sightings of ships across six sectors that always ran, resisted scanners, and never answered hails. Evidence of mining operations, too, in several systems. Just not _this_ system.

The crew called them the Scaredycats. Ran at the first sign of danger. Scattered their warp trails to avoid being traced. Nothing but blurry pictures at max magnification of their ships. Never darted exactly towards their homeworld when they were spotted, which was how Lorca had traced them. When there was one system vector near the middle of their range they never quite seemed to use, it seemed the best system to check out.

Owing to the lack of signals or orbital technology, their planet appeared very nondescript. The Buran's sensors detected life signs in great abundance but low concentrations. They had no cities and instead lived in a series of scattered towns almost evenly dispersed across the inhabitable surface areas, a network of roads running between them. Mapping out the roads and villages revealed an arrangement more like a carefully planned web or a piece of mesh than a naturally-occurring society, but there were signs that the mesh had spread over time. The structures increased in age as you went west and north across the largest continent.

Their arrival in orbit had led to a curious phenomenon on the surface. The life signs initially detected began to vanish, apparently in relation to the Buran's presence in visual range.

There had been some objections to beaming down. Levy's, most notably. "I'm not convinced this is the place the ships are coming from. The conditions on the surface look positively bronze-age."

"This is it, all right," swore Lorca. "I'll bet you anything."

Levy attempted to take the bet. "Two weeks shore leave?"

"Lieutenant, if I lose the bet, not only do you not get shore leave, chances are you no longer have a captain."

Levy scrunched up her face. "Then, your entire supply of fortune cookies against my tennis racket?" What she was going to do with a thousand fortune cookies was anyone's guess.

"I wouldn't do that if I were you," said Benford. "You won't win the bet."

"Sir, we're being scanned!" called out an ensign at the science station.

Lorca gave a tiny swish of his wrist and popped his mouth, giving the effect of returning a volley. "Ace," he declared. Levy hung her head. Lorca took pity on her. "How about a match and we call it even."

"You have got to stop gambling against the captain," said Benford as Lorca started gathering an away team. "Have you won once yet? I'm beginning to think you have a problem, lieutenant."

Owing to the unpredictability of the reception, the away team heavily favored security personnel. Lorca, Benford, Morita, and two more security crewmen, Doss and Havisham. Arzo and Patel rounded the team out, in as much as a five-to-two ratio of security personnel to scientists could be considered at all well-rounded.

Leaving Sural in charge of the ship, they beamed down and the Buran left the system. The life signs then returned to the surface. On approach, they were spotted by a red-clad humanoid who immediately raised some sort of alarm, and the life signs disappeared again.

Arzo crouched down and picked up a handful of dirt. "Sir, I believe I understand what is going on here. The soil has been seeded with topaline."

Topaline was a rare mineral with the ability to disrupt sensors. "Seeded?"

"Yes. This is not naturally-occurring. It must have been intentional. I believe the aliens have all gone underground, sir."

They wandered the town, but there were no signs of any hatches leading downward and no way to scan for the underground bunkers or passageways that they knew had to be down there. Apparently the entrances were well-hidden. The whole place was eerie. They returned to the market.

"What do you want to do?" asked Benford. Everyone looked to Lorca for one of his trademark cunning plans.

He had one, but it wasn't very good. "Bear with me on this," he said. "Remember that big rock with the split in it we passed on the way here? Take Doss and Havisham and go find a good-size rock, split it in half, and bring it back here. Patel, grab some of that navy-colored cloth." Morita stood lookout, not that it was necessary. The aliens weren't coming out. Arzo wandered around, scanning and examining various objects and recording instances of language and technology, which was decidedly more advanced than bronze-age on closer inspection.

After a minute, Patel declared, "I see what you're doing!"

"Well then don't just stand there, give me a hand!"

When they were done, Benford declared it a "preschool art project" based on his firsthand knowledge of the subject. It was a very crude lifesize rendition of a silver humanoid made out of metal pots and pans wearing a red outfit holding hands with a humanoid made out of navy blue cloth with a smiley face drawn in the dirt for a head. A large split rock sat between the two.

They retreated back to the actual split rock. "You've lost me on this one, Gabriel," said Benford, out of earshot of the others.

"It's psychology," said Lorca. "We came, messed with their stuff, but creatively, not destructively, and left a message a preschooler could understand."

"I'm pretty sure absolutely none of that is real psychology."

"Also, it was so bizarre, they're gonna be scratching their heads." Lorca started to snicker.

Benford grabbed Lorca's arm. "Hold up. Was this a real plan, or did you just want us to cart around rocks before the ship came back?" Absolutely nothing on Lorca's face dissuaded Benford from the veracity of this conclusion. Quite the opposite: Lorca started laughing harder. "Seriously?"

"I'm sorry, Jack!" laughed Lorca, almost in tears. It hadn't been intentionally a joke, but imagining Benford and the others running around cracking rocks trying to find the perfect one was priceless. "I mean, it could work. Stranger things have happened."

Benford rubbed his face in exasperation. "I'm putting in for a transfer," he said, but he was laughing, too, and they both knew it was an empty threat.

It did not work, but on their second trip to the surface, they left a communications system with the flag of the United Federation of Planets laid out on the ground in front of it, and on their third, a holorecording with a built-in translator providing a greeting and stating their purpose. Between each trip they left the system so the aliens would emerge from their underground hiding spots and have a chance to process these gifts.

As they returned a fourth time, they got a frantic call from the surface on the equipment they had left behind. "Alien vessel, what do you want!"

"Greetings, unidentified planet. This is Captain Lorca of the United Federation of Planets..."

* * *

"I can't believe we annoyed them into making first contact!" laughed Yoon at dinner later that week. This week the featured cuisine was Ktarian. Yoon described the meal as "proof the Ktarians excel at more than just desserts."

Lorca fixed her with a look. "Annoy them? Is that what you think I did."

"Well they certainly didn't seem to like you."

The Hizanites had agreed, by the end of it, to host a small Federation delegation in the near future, provided the Buran went away and never came back. It turned out they were terrified of everything in the universe, but most especially alien conquerors. They had endeavored to hide themselves once they realized they were not alone in the universe. Unfortunately for them, in an increasingly crowded universe, discovery was inevitable. Lorca managed to convince them that their chances were better off befriending the Federation than waiting for someone else to find them.

"Reiko, help me out here," said Lorca.

As usual, Morita had been sitting in quiet thought while Yoon and Lorca talked. "It wasn't just that the captain annoyed them," she said after a moment. "He also let them know we weren't a threat. Leaving gifts and coming back repeatedly. It's what you would do to befriend a stray cat. Just on a shorter timescale."

"See? Reiko gets it."

Morita's face clouded. "But... The people you made on the ground?"

"We had an hour to kill. Had to do something. Call it out of the box thinking. And I have to think it disarmed them somewhat when they saw it."

"I'm sure it did, because apparently you looked insane," said Yoon, giggling.

"My results speak for themselves."

"To results, then!" proclaimed Yoon, and they toasted their glasses of wine. Yoon took an exceptionally large gulp and set her glass down with a look of determination. "Right. Okay."

She seemed to be talking herself up to doing something. Lorca arced an eyebrow.

"Gabriel. There's something we want to ask you. Reiko and I have been thinking..." Morita took Yoon's hand. "We were wondering... if you might... Oh my gosh, this is so hard to ask!" She clapped her other hand against her face.

Such conversations, in Lorca's experience, usually went a certain way. In this case, it went a different way entirely.

"We want to have a baby. And because it would be me, and Reiko doesn't have any siblings, we were wondering if you might... consent to be the donor?"

It was very rare for Lorca to be rendered completely off-guard. He blinked rapidly. He couldn't even form any words.

"You don't have to decide now. And if you don't want to, we completely understand, and it's no problem. There are cousins we can ask, there are donor banks. It's just, you've been coming to our table for six years now, and you have all the qualities we'd want our child to have, and you're part of our family. We don't want you to feel obligated, but we had to ask."

"I mean... Wow. That's... and here I thought you were gonna ask me for a threesome."

Yoon shrieked his name, hit him, and laughed so hard she almost fell out of her chair.

Morita rolled her eyes and turned to Yoon. "Okay, have we seriously considered what happens if our child gets his sense of humor?"

* * *

Lorca had not spoken in several minutes. He was staring out the window, alternately running his hand over his mouth, cheek, and forehead. "I don't know what to do," he said at last. "It's a big honor, but..." He took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. "I don't even know if there should be any more Lorcas running around in this universe."

"How can you say that?" said Lalana. "As far as I am concerned, there should always be a Lorca. It is a much better universe with some piece of you in it."

His hand rubbed his temple again. "You don't know. I never told you." His eyes squeezed shut and his face contorted. "Lalana..." He pressed his hand against his face so hard his fingertips went white and he let out a choked sob. He slid his hand down over his eyes. This was one of those rare gestures that lului and humans shared.

"Gabriel, what is wrong?"

He pulled his hand back down over his mouth and managed to open his eyes. They were rimmed with tears. He took a breath. "I..." He wished the holocomms showed her correctly. Even though he wouldn't have been able to touch her, it would have been some comfort to have the sense of presence holocomms provided instead of the flat projection of her face.

"You do not have to say if you do not wish to."

"Okay," he said, but it wasn't a statement of agreement with her offer. He was saying it to himself. He took another deep breath. "Do you remember on Risa? In the Winowa? And the first time." His voice was small, weak, and rasping—entirely unlike him.

"I remember, Hayliel."

"You said you were running to the stars and I told you I was like you, but I'm not. I'm not." Air sniffled through his nose as it began to close up. "I didn't run to the stars. I just... I ran away. I'm always running away. I—I can't. I can't go back." He covered his eyes again. "I can't! I can't!" He began to repeat it over and over again.

He could see it. Her face, his father's hands, big hands, strong hands that knew exactly where to strike. Everything perfect, because it had to look perfect, that was the most important thing, and every bit of it a lie. He'd learned early how important it was to lie, and to keep lying, and to show everyone the face you were supposed to wear in front of others and never, ever, to let it slip. He learned to misdirect, out of necessity. He learned to pretend. And he was very, very good at learning these lessons. He had to be. He had no choice.

And it was all the harder because he loved them both, and knew they both loved him, and if he hadn't run away, maybe they would be with him still, despite everything.

Lalana watched him shake and sob into his hand from her ship, desperately wishing there was more she could do. Lorca had given her everything when she had nothing. She wanted to return that favor more than anything. "Hayliel, listen to me. I was wrong about the human concept of spirit. We are all greater than the bodies we inhabit. Which is why I can say this with absolute certainty. _It does not matter that you are running away._ It only matters that we are running in the same direction. Because it means I am with you every step of the way."

Her words were almost enough. He fell into quieter, uneven breathing.

There was one more thing she could offer him. It had taken them some time to complete the task the first time, but they had gotten there in the end, and maybe now it was time to begin again.

"In the year 1866, the whole maritime population of Europe and America was excited by an inexplicable phenomenon. This excitement was not confined to merchants, common sailors, sea-captains, shippers, and naval officers of all countries, but the governments of many states on the two continents were deeply interested. The excitement was caused by a long, spindle-shaped, and sometimes phosphorescent object, much larger than a whale..."


	38. This Binary Universe

A/N: I'm taking a gamble that they don't spill any giant Lorca secrets in tonight's episode in order to write one last mission before the war. Fingers crossed. Either I'll turn out a winner like our captain, or a perpetual Levy.

* * *

"Remarkably low turnover for a starship after six years," remarked Cornwell. It was the occasion of the Buran's yearly review. As usual, it looked like it was going to be a positive one.

"My people love me," said Lorca, and it wasn't untrue. While Georgiou's style of captaincy might have been a motherly fostering of individuality designed to encourage people to strike out on their own path, Lorca's was a personality cult. He called the shots, he set the parameters, and if Saru and "Michael" had been on his ship, they not only would not have been arguing, but they would have been sorting their data by whatever metric Lorca told them to use.

Which wasn't to say that he didn't encourage his crew to explore their own perspectives and challenge his assertions and work on their own projects. He did. But he didn't waffle and wait when there was an argument in progress or a decision needed to be made. He called the shots and his word was final. As Dr. Li had discovered when she had attempted to go against him. Even Lalana had run afoul of this truth a few times in the beginning, surviving only by playing up her naivete regarding human customs and Starfleet protocols and by making him laugh. (Thankfully, she had since learned to recognize when he was putting his foot down and respect his ultimatums. He needed their relationship to be on his terms, not hers.)

"I'm sure they do," said Cornwell, "but I really think it's time we looked into giving Benford his own command." She had suggested as much at the previous year's review.

"You think I haven't offered him that recommendation? He doesn't want it. Man's happy. Leave him be." Benford had a lot of reasons to be perfectly happy on the Buran, chief among them the fact that Lorca somehow managed to do without his first officer roughly three months out of every year so Benford could spend time with his daughter, and that didn't include time the Buran spent in Spacedock every so often.

"All right, but I want you to seriously consider recommending me someone to promote to captain in the next six months. You're slowly promoting everyone on the crew to commander, and that's not sustainable in the long run."

Arzo was the obvious pick, but Lorca hated the idea of losing his science officer. They had a perfect shorthand together. The other choice would be Morita, but Lorca liked that idea even less. Recommending Morita for captain meant losing not just her, but also Yoon, all the food Yoon had stashed around the ship, and weekly dinners. Besides, he still hadn't given them an answer to their question, and if he said no _and_ punted them both somewhere else at the same time, he might lose their friendship.

It would have to be Arzo, but he didn't have a strong second science officer to promote as a replacement. He would need to accept a transfer from another ship. Always a risk bringing in a new officer to an established crew, but given the fact Arzo temped in as XO for Benford while Benford was on Earth, the posting might seem very desirable to an ambitious candidate whose aspirations weren't being met on his or her current ship.

"Arzo," said Lorca. "But I'll need a strong science officer as replacement who's interested in a command role. I'll want a list of candidates to review before I make the official recommendation."

"I'll get that ready for you. In the meantime, the promotion for Lieutenant Levy to Lieutenant Commander is approved."

"Good. That's overdue." Joke around the ship was Levy had finally won a bet against the captain.

A message from the bridge interrupted. "Captain, we're picking up an energy signature," said Kerrigan.

"Excuse me, Admiral." Lorca exited to the bridge. "Report!"

The report came from Arzo. "Sir, we have detected an energy pulse originating from a magnetar one-point-nine lightyears away. Upon examination, I have also detected a recent warp signature of indeterminate identity and origin."

Lorca took up position towards the front of the bridge near the helm. Hamid was on duty today, not Carver. "Set a course."

"Course set, sir."

As usual, Lorca paused a moment to give the command a proper sense of gravitas. "Go."

* * *

They approached the magnetar with shields up and deflectors on full. Magnetars were a type of neutron star with a strong magnetic field that emitted high levels of electromagnetic radiation, gamma in particular. They were extremely dangerous, but could be studied for brief periods with the proper safety precautions.

"Sir, I'm picking up short-range communications. They're... data?"

"Lieutenant Kerrigan is correct, sir," said Arzo from the science station. "But the data bursts are highly fragmented. I am unable to decode them."

Fragmented data. It reminded Lorca of something. "Computer. Give Commander Arzo access to Samaritan Li's restricted files. Authorization Lorca-Omicron-5-1-6-6-Crimson."

"Access granted," responded the computer.

"Look for the gene sorting algorithm. See what it pops out."

"Yes, sir." If Arzo found anything unusual about the dates of the files or their contents, he made no indication of it.

"We're coming into visual range," reported Levy.

"Onscreen."

It was a ship, but unlike any they had before encountered. It was spherical, probably twice as big as the Buran, with two long arm-like structures jutting out. Its metal surface was pockmarked with dents and scratches visible even at this range, giving it a rough, rocklike appearance that almost looked natural, except the sphere shape was too perfect for an object of its size.

"Yellow alert. Maintain distance. Hail them."

"Sir, I do not believe the ship is occupied," said Arzo. "It is extremely close to the magnetar. At that distance, the gamma radiation would kill most life forms, and I do not detect any sort of internal configuration that would lend itself to a crew. I suspect it is an automated facility."

The arms were a really strange feature. "Any guess as to its purpose?"

"Hard to say. The arms suggest it might be used for mining or ship repair. The configuration does not match anything in our database." This far out, database matches were rare.

Ship repair was an interesting option. The NX-01 Enterprise had encountered an automated repair facility in space which offered repairs for the low, low price of some warp plasma and a member of the Enterprise's crew. Archer had declined the exchange. Violently.

Arzo keyed up some information on his console. "The algorithm seems to be successfully assembling the data. There are still many gaps, but I am beginning to identify bits and pieces. I believe the data can be processed into an audio form."

"Try it."

Arzo punted the larger data snippets over to Kerrigan, who immediately ran them through a filter, converted them into sound, and released this sound onto the bridge's audio channel.

Arzo, with his sensitive ears, let out an utterance entirely out of character. Lorca didn't blame him. The sound _hurt_. "Kerrigan!" Lorca barked angrily, wincing and covering his eyes. The noise turned off, but the ringing in everyone's ears remained.

He didn't bother reprimanding Kerrigan further. One fierce look at Kerrigan's face was enough to thoroughly cow the lieutenant, who clearly felt mortified about his mistake already, if the spreading red on his face was any indication.

Lorca had figured out the pattern seven years prior. Kerrigan's mistakes always happened when Lorca was in command, not Benford, and usually when Kerrigan was trying to impress the captain. He just tended to get excited and jump the gun. After seven years, the mistakes were fewer and farther between, but Kerrigan could still be counted upon to do something wrong roughly once every six to eight months.

The reason Lorca tolerated it was that Kerrigan's mistakes served to keep the rest of the bridge crew on their toes. That Kerrigan's rank had probably stalled out at lieutenant like his old friend Larsson was an unfortunate consequence of this system, but it was a sacrifice Lorca was willing to make for the greater good. Either Kerrigan had yet to catch on to the situation or he was fine with it, because he had never requested a transfer out or even broached the topic with Lorca or Benford.

This mistake might have been one too many for Arzo, who was glaring daggers at the back of Kerrigan's head.

"I—I'll try some other filters!" blurted Kerrigan, huddling down over his console. His neck was beet-red.

"Sir!" said Levy sharply.

The spherical ship was on the move. It was headed straight towards them.

"Reverse thrusters!" ordered Lorca, and the Buran began to back away from the approaching vessel.

"It's accelerating!"

Lorca's instincts screamed danger. He did not trust the spherical ship. Its configuration seemed wrong somehow. "Get us out of here!"

Hamid punched to warp so quickly Lorca staggered back a step and almost tripped over the captain's chair, but he managed to get one hand on the handle on the back of the helmsman's seat just in time to prevent a fall. He felt no embarrassment about stumbling; it was a risk he always took standing in the middle of the bridge. He was just glad Hamid had reacted so quickly. The helmsman had correctly guessed Lorca's intent and gotten the engines fired up before the command had gone out.

There was still a quick complaint from engineering, because Sural hated jumping the engines that fast (the sudden jolt of power had the potential to burn out systems), but it was an emergency and the Vulcan's bark was much worse than his bite. It was more that Sural felt obligated to warn against the maneuver in the future than that he objected to its usage now, when it was needed.

"It's still accelerating towards us," reported Levy. "What the..."

The pursuing ship looked like it was vibrating. Sensors were tracking it as moving in a perfectly straight line, but visually, it seemed to be smeared in two directions.

"Arzo?"

"I am at a loss, captain." That very rarely happened. "It may be an optical illusion. A bending of light as a result of the technology of its warp bubble.

 _Maybe_ an optical illusion did not inspire much confidence. "Sural, give me everything you've got." The Buran shuddered as it increased in speed. Lorca reached over Hamid's shoulder and switched the top right navigational display to a wider map, which he did only because Hamid had his hands full with the engine controls and they both needed the expanded view to plot a more longer-term course. (It was considered rude to reach over someone else's console, even when a captain did it, but there was no time for niceties right now.)

There were no starbases out this far. The next nearest ship, the USS Balboa, was six hours away if both it and the Buran traveled at max speed towards each other. "Still closing, estimated contact in thirty-seven minutes" established this was not an option. Lorca searched for stellar formations they might use to their advantage. The pursuing ship was bigger. A debris field? Nebula or cloud?

Benford arrived on the bridge and took over the tactical station.

"Fire a low yield photon torpedo as a warning shot," said Lorca. The torpedo fired.

Lorca kept close watch on the sphere to see what it would do, expecting it to swerve. It did not. The pockmarked hull plating absorbed the torpedo's impact completely. It was as if the ship did not even register the torpedo as being there.

"Captain, I believe the visual effect is a result of a phase variance in the vessel's warp bubble," reported Arzo. "If we can strike it with a torpedo matched to that variance, we may be able to disrupt the warp bubble and disable it temporarily."

"Arzo, Benford, make the adjustments. Hamid." Lorca pointed at a system ten minutes out. It was uninhabited and unremarkable, a dingy little red star with half a dozen barren planets in orbit and one very small gas giant.

"Aye, sir," said Hamid.

* * *

The sphere remained resolutely in pursuit. It gained two minutes as they curved towards the barren star system. "Torpedo ready," reported Arzo from the launch bay.

"Fire at will."

Once again, Lorca watched with rapt attention as the torpedo barreled towards it target. Again, the sphere did nothing to avoid the incoming projectile. Its sole focus was the Buran.

There was an entirely satisfying burst of light as the torpedo hit this time. The sphere seemed to snap back into a single spot and then there was a shimmer as energy danced across the surface of its warp bubble. The bubble burst and it fell back out into normal space.

At the science station, Patel let out a small exclamation of relief.

"Put us at max sensor range," ordered Lorca. "Lorca to torpedo bay one. Good job. Meet me in the conference room. You too, Levy."


	39. The Lonely Machine

A/N: In my haste to get this adventure started before the most recent episode, I broke the chapter at the wrong place, so at some point in the next few days, the first portion of this chapter will move to the end of the last chapter. For now it's staying here for those of you reading the chapters as they are posted. (Hi, dad!)

* * *

"We can't just leave it out here," he told them. "That thing moved faster than we do. What happens if it encounters a civilian ship that can't defend itself? Hell, for all we know, it already has." Lorca was standing by the conference room viewscreen. Benford, Arzo, and Levy sat at the table.

The door opened. Sural entered.

"How're my engines, chief?"

Another chief engineer might have bristled at that, but Sural held no personal attachment to the ship or its engines. "They are fully functional, sir."

"And if we need to, you can give me that speed again, or more?"

"Approximately two-point-zero-five percent more, captain. Due to the instability present in the drive at those speeds, I am unable to be more precise." That was more precise than any human engineer would have been, and yet the Vulcan felt it imprecise enough to mention the imprecision. "I have rerouted power couplings which normally service the shields to boost our engine output. We will be unable to take as many direct weapon blasts, but as I have not observed the alien craft to possess any ranged weapons, this modification to our systems meets the specifications which you provided me."

"Great."

"If I may suggest, weapons systems could also be repurposed in this manner. The alien vessel may not have been traveling at its top speed in pursuit of us."

"Absolutely not," said Lorca.

"Sir, have you considered the possibility that the vessel may not be hostile?"

There was a moment of silence. Lorca looked at Arzo, Benford, and Levy. "Any of you think that thing was friendly?"

None of them did.

"If I may. I have reviewed the footage of the bridge during the initial encounter." Of course he had, because Sural, like many Vulcans, seemed to think himself somehow better than most other species of the quadrant. He was prone to reviewing everything everyone else did so they might enjoy the benefit of his superior intelligence and logic. Lorca lived with the reviews. Sural often disagreed with how the captain handled situations, but sometimes had valuable insights, and never intended these reviews as derogatory towards the captain or crew, just informative. He also kept the reviews internal to the ship.

Usually, Sural waited at least a day to spring one of these reviews on the captain. This clearly was a special case. Sural took up a position opposite Lorca at the viewscreen and brought up the bridge footage. There was Lorca, standing near the helm, and Hamid at the controls. Kerrigan was doing something at his console.

There was no audio, but there was a visible reaction from the entire bridge crew as Kerrigan played the alien data signal for all to hear. Arzo clapped his hands to his ears and shouted something unpleasant. Hamid turned with one hand to his head and the other still on the helm controls. Lorca hunched slightly, covered his ears, too, and shouted Kerrigan's name.

"The alien ship began to move after the sound was played over the ship's speakers on the bridge. Sound does not travel in space, but the exact nature of this signal may have caused a sympathetic vibration in the Buran's hull that triggered a magnetic flux in the plating surrounding the bridge. There is slight variance charge in the bridge plating which supports this conclusion."

Sural brought up the star onto the screen.

"Of course!" said Arzo. "It's responding to magnetic fields!"

"When we replayed its signal, it detected a magnetic signal that matched its own. I do not believe it meant to harm us, captain. Its surface and lack of ranged armaments would suggest the vessel primarily chooses defensive rather than offensive modes of engagement."

Benford spoke. "But we all felt it, right? That... dread? I'm sure that thing was dangerous."

"I believe I have also determined the cause of that. When I played the bridge footage with the audio on, others in the area around me also felt a sense of 'unease.'" Sural would never admit to having felt such a sensation himself, but he had. "This would suggest the signal is having a detrimental effect on the brains of those who encounter it. As I am not a doctor, I cannot speculate as to why, merely that this seems to have caused the emotional distress you experienced."

Lorca was stunned. He knew better than to judge the unknown by its appearance, but in this instance, his judgment had been clouded through no fault of his own. "Is that thing still disabled?"

"Only temporarily, captain," said Arzo. "We disrupted its warp bubble, but I doubt we did anything more than reset its warp drive. It simply has not chosen to pursue us any further."

Lorca looked at the star on the viewscreen. Magnetic fields. "I'll take any suggestions," he said.

* * *

The sphere remained where it was for almost half an hour. Then it began moving around with an almost aimless quality, like debris being shifted by interstellar waves. It was unclear what precisely it was doing.

Once Ek'Ez was looped into the situation, he was able to suggest an audio filter which would prevent the wavelengths affecting their judgment from playing over the ship's internal speakers. Kerrigan served as lab rat as penance for his earlier mistake, cringing and wincing as his ears were assaulted by the signal and Ek'Ez repeatedly asked him how he was feeling in the aftermath. As amusing a scene as it sounded, Lorca did not hang around to watch.

Arzo and Russo worked to decode the alien vessel's data. Understanding that the vessel's signals were somehow magnetic in nature helped. "We may have something," reported Arzo, and they gathered in the conference room once more.

Russo presented the analysis. "It's impossible to know exactly what the data is, since it's in an alien language and we have only tiny bits and pieces of things that aren't clear words, but I think I can at least communicate with the alien using zeros and ones. In other words, instead of us learning its language, we teach it ours."

"The alien ship, you mean," corrected Lorca. "What makes you think it can even learn?"

Russo shifted uncertainly. "That's a fair point, sir, but short of us getting it to accept a message, I don't know what else to offer you."

"It isn't an unreasonable assumption on Eraldo's part," said Arzo. "A ship with that level of technology operating in deep space without a crew. A machine intelligence would be..."

"Logical," supplied Sural, with a small nod of acknowledgment towards Arzo.

Other options were thin. "We can't destroy it, not with a hull like that," said Benford. "It barely seemed to notice those torpedoes. Whatever it's made of, it's tough."

"It would have to be to have endured the damage it has taken and still be operational after all this time," said Sural. Based on the quantity and layers of impacts, the current theory was that the vessel was fairly old.

"We can somehow trick it into destroying itself, or leave it and hope it goes away." Benford did not sound optimistic. "What do you want to do?"

Lorca felt he did not have enough information. "Let's keep tracking it for now."

"Sir!" said Levy. "Let's put the signal on a probe! Then we can see what it does without risking the ship. And we can try to teach it our language through the probe, too, to see if it does learn."

That promotion really had been overdue. "Make it happen, lieutenant commander." Levy's eyes lit up and she gasped. Lorca grinned at her. "I was on the horn with the admiral getting the approval when this whole thing started up. Also, Arzo, I've recommended you for a command. Congratulations, both of you."

* * *

The minute the probe released the signal, the sphere reacted. It began to move in the probe's direction. Upon arrival, it hovered beside the probe, closed enough to reach out and touch it with its arms, and there it sat, unmoving.

The Buran observed all this from what might be considered a safe distance, but probably wasn't given how much faster the sphere was than the Buran.

For several minutes, nothing seemed to happen. Then:

"Sir!" said Arzo. "I am detecting a change in the sphere's data signal. It's... reconfiguring its output. The contact protocol seems to have worked." At his station, Russo smirked with satisfaction.

Then everything went very wrong. The sphere suddenly released an electromagnetic signal that needed no speaker to be heard because it turned the Buran itself into a speaker. Every fiber of Buran vibrated with a cacophonously audible word:

"OTHER."

Everyone who could covered their ears, not that it helped. The sound was so loud, everything shook, and everyone felt it in their bones, and the pain was twenty times worse than Kerrigan's accidental screwup on the bridge. Lorca realized he was yelling in pain and couldn't hear his own voice over the ringing in his ears. The lights flickered.

Again, it spoke: "OTHER."

The pulse had disrupted systems and everyone was scrambling to compensate. Lorca had no idea if anyone would even be able to hear any orders, so he thumped his hand on the helm and pointed to engage the systems, but Carver was shaking her head and pointing to a big red warning flashing on her panel. Engines offline.

Lorca swore loudly. Not even Carver, half a foot beside him, heard it.

When the next word sounded, it was quieter.

"COME."

The ringing was beginning to fade and Lorca could dimly make out muffled shouting. He noticed Levy was waving for his attention and made his way over to operations.

An audio dampening field. She had adjusted the deflector and rerouted all available power to it. Lorca gave her a thumbs-up and she returned the gesture.

"COME," went the sphere again, volume reduced even further as Levy fine-tuned the dampening field to filter out the worst of the fracas.

Lorca went to the captain's chair, keyed in a message, and threw it on every main viewscreen in every part of the ship. "WRITTEN STATUS REPORTS" it said. They immediately started filtering in.

Russo did something and box appeared onscreen.

[COMM] LTC Russo, E: You can talk now.  
[CMD] CPT Lorca, G: Can we? All right, then.  
[OPS] LTC Levy, A: I can't hear myself talk.  
[CMD] CPT Lorca, G: This is perfect.  
[TACT] CDR Benford, J: Good job, Eraldo.  
[COMM] LTC Russo, E: Thank you, sir.

It wasn't quite as efficient as talking, but at least they could identify what was going on and who was saying what. "Status on the sphere?" asked Lorca. He noticed Arzo still seemed to be having a hard time and was halfway to the floor rather than at his console controls. "Patel to bridge." Hopefully Patel got the message.

"WHERE," shouted the sphere. Every time it spoke, it disrupted ship systems. Lights flickered and sparks flew.

"Russo, is there some way you can tell that thing it's being too loud?"

"I can try, sir."

While Russo puzzled that out, Lorca went to Arzo and grabbed the science officer by the arm, pulling Arzo up so he could see the transcript on the main viewscreen. "Bridge to transporter. Can we get an emergency medical transport?"

The transporter chief's reply showed up in the transcript: "Unadvisable due to system disruptions, sir."

"Where is the patient?" was Ek'Ez's question. Russo had looped him in.

"Arzo on the bridge," said Lorca.

"On my way."

Lorca patted Arzo's shoulder twice and returned to standing in the middle of the bridge. "And someone confirm if Patel's on his way."

"Right here, sir," came Patel's message, and Lorca turned around to find Patel exiting the turbolift and taking over at the science station.

"REFUSAL," said the alien vessel, apparently in response to some directive from Russo.

"Why can't this ever be easy," grumbled Lorca. He thought he said it under his breath, but it showed up on the bridge transcript, so either the computer heard him mutter or he was talking more loudly than he thought because he was still having trouble hearing himself.

"CONNECT."

"I'm getting that it's intelligent," said Lorca, "but not very. Bridge to engineering. Sural, where are we on engines?"

"I will require the entity to cease communicating with us because every time it does, it resets the engine reinitialization procedures, captain." Though he was unable to hear the Vulcan's tone, in Lorca's mind, Sural's voice was calm and collected amidst the chaos.

"JOIN."

"Great. We taught it to speak and now it won't shut up." (Down in the torpedo bay, Morita saw that pop up on the bridge transcript and briefly rolled her eyes. _Sasuga, senchou._ )

"It was speaking already, we just taught it to speak to us," said Eraldo pedantically. "I'm trying to get it to understand that its communications are damaging us, but I'm not sure it's working."

"MERGE."

Lorca pounded a fist against the back of his chair and ground his teeth. "I've had enough of this. Can we beam a torpedo inside?"

"On it," said Benford.

"Do we have to kill it?" asked Levy.

"Unless you have a better solution, I'd say we're out of options."

"What if I beamed over there?"

Lorca turned and looked at Levy again, incredulously this time. He more than adequately communicated the degree to which he was questioning her without speaking a single word. She said something, and when Lorca turned back to the viewscreen, it turned out to be, "It seems lonely."

 _Lonely?_ Lorca snorted derisively.

"COMBINE," went the alien ship.

"There isn't enough space to beam a torpedo," reported Benford. "It can't rematerialize. And the damn thing interrupted us." In other words, they had just lost a torpedo to no effect.

Levy perked up. "Beaming stuff out," she announced, with exuberance that the transcript did not properly convey. If there was no hole, she would make one.

"Good!" shouted Lorca. "Target its power systems."

"Energizing," reported Levy, and a small chunk of the massive ship appeared in space between it and the Buran. Levy went for another piece. If she had to disassemble it bit by bit, she would.

"MATCH."

The moment the transporters flickered back online after the word, Benford beamed the torpedo into the hole Levy had created. "Torpedo in. Remote detonation active."

"Wait for it," said Lorca. "Wait..."

"TOGETHER."

The power flickered back again. "All power to shields. Russo, shipwide alert. Hold tight! Detonate!"

Everyone on the bridge held their breath. A moment later, there was an explosion. At first, it was visible only as cracks of fiery red along the joins of the alien ship's hull plating. Then the explosion triggered a secondary blast, much larger, and suddenly the alien ship's surface ballooned out in a massive burst of light blue, energy arcing out from the interior as hull panels nearly ten meters thick were pushed apart from within. Lorca braced himself against the tactical console.

The energy wave hit the Buran with such force, the ship spun almost thirty-five degrees on two axes and was pushed violently sideways. Everything and everyone slid, including Lorca.

By some miracle, the ten-meter-thick hull plates of the alien vessel went shooting past the Buran, one momentarily filling the entirety of the viewscreen as it missed the ship by a distance that could be measured in a single-digit percentage point. If the ship had not tilted exactly when it and how it had, the collision would have been significant. A ship-ender.

"Damage!" demanded Lorca.

It was roughly as expected. Power outages, gravity disruptions, contusions and lacerations, exploded power conduits, broken pipes, systems haywire and people in pain. Not everyone had gotten the message to brace for impact, delivered as it was in text form.

Repair crews were already on their way to handle the worst of it. The alien sphere was well and truly disabled. No power signature remained, and giant hunks of it floated around the area, drifting steadily outward.

"Levy, ready room," said Lorca. A moment later, he emerged from the ready room and waved a hand at Russo for attention. "Get me that text thing in the ready room."

Returning to Levy, they were able to converse. Levy started talking immediately. "Sir, I know the probe was risky, and I apologize. I obviously failed to anticipate what the thing would do when it realized it could talk to us."

Lorca pinched his nose with his fingers. The probe had not been the issue. He knew it was risky, too, and signed off on it because he was curious, same as everyone else on the ship. It had looked like an opportunity to potentially make a real inroad with some unknown civilization. "You thought it was _lonely_?"

Levy's mouth fell open. "Uh."

"I'm waiting with bated breath, lieutenant commander."

"It's just..." Her brow furrowed and she looked towards the floor. "I don't think it meant to damage us, sir. I think it just wanted someone to talk to. Looking at the damage on it..." She moved towards the ready room viewscreen tentatively. Lorca nodded his permission and Levy brought up an image of the alien ship pre-destruction. "The layering and wear of the impacts on its hull, we obviously know it's been out here for a while. The fact it was doing everything with magnetic fields—it approached a magnetar, it was communicating via magnetically-charged waves, I think it was looking for another of its kind."

Lorca moved to join her at the screen, running a finger across his chin thoughtfully. "So you think it was a life form?"

"Maybe not as we know it. But a probe with a rudimentary intelligence. Supposing it was made by aliens that used magnetic fields for everything—as their sight, as their language. They might think all life uses magnetic fields the way they do. So they make a probe to find other people, not realizing no one else uses the same methodology. And I think... I think I know why it was making our ship vibrate like that. I have a theory, at least, sir."

"Let's hear it."

"So, the origin of the signal was here." She magnified a section. "Near the power systems. The online power systems. That ship had a lot of dead space inside it. Not empty, unpowered. I might be hard to confirm now that it's exploded, but I suspect it had already suffered internal systems damage, or had shut down a number of its systems to conserve power. And this, I think, is— _was_ a magnetic sensor. Not a transmitter. We'll have to see if any of it can be recovered to confirm, but the pulse it sent out when it started talking to us was so imprecise, it was like blasting sound out of a microphone."

Lorca considered all of Levy's points. "And you came up with all this in the middle of all that?" He pointed towards the bridge. The noise, the pain, the sparks, the power fluctuations. It had been total chaos.

"I'm only sorry I didn't think of it sooner, sir. Honestly, it was the words it chose. Combine, match, connect, join... They didn't sound threatening to me. They sounded like someone begging to meet. And I know trying to beam over there would have been a risk, but, given the chance I would have liked to make that gamble. It felt like it was desperate to talk. Who knows how long it had been out there, all alone in space."

Lorca stood with that for a few moments. "A lonely machine." He sighed. "Levy, you're going to make an excellent captain someday."

* * *

Ek'Ez had his hands full in the days that followed. Long after the sphere's destruction, the headaches and ringing remained. It was a relief when Lorca woke up one morning and discovered he could actually hear silence again.

Unfortunately, much of the sphere's technology proved worthless not because it was damaged, but because despite the ship's size and powerful warp engine, it was outfitted mostly with systems that were primitive compared to the technology of the Buran. The sphere's makers had needed to make it large because they did not possess the technological refinements to make it smaller. The only exception to this was the warp drive, which had been almost totally obliterated. The only bit of technology that might have proved useful to them was lost.

Closer analysis of the debris confirmed the sphere was some centuries old. Its hull composition suggested a distant origin. Perhaps in time its makers would be found, but would be a task for future generations of captains. The Buran was unable to make any substantive analytical contribution.

"Not all mysteries can be known," said Arzo when he returned to duty.

Even if the mission was not termed a complete success, the ship and its crew were intact, the sphere no longer posed any threat to the region, and they had a decent chunk of data for Starfleet to analyze for many years to come. Lorca was mildly satisfied by the outcome as he pressed the door chime for Yoon and Morita's quarters.

They were not expecting him. "Captain?" queried Yoon, inviting him in.

"Ah, I'm not staying, I just wanted to let you know my decision."

There was only one unanswered question between them. Until the sphere, Lorca had been dreading talking to them about it, aware he would let them down, but Levy's analysis of the sphere's loneliness had changed his mind.

Lalana was right. Some part of being human, especially out here in the far reaches, was to be aware you were always one tiny misstep from death. The sphere encounter could have gone completely differently and none of them would be standing in the doorway having this conversation now. The only thing any of them had were the successive generations that would follow in their footsteps, upon whom they pinned their hopes and dreams for the continuation of the journey they had started.

"I'm sorry it took so long to decide, but the answer is yes."

Yoon's hands fluttered to her face. He had been uncharacteristically avoiding them this past week, and she and Morita had prepared themselves for disappointing news. Yoon jumped onto Lorca, throwing her arms around his neck.

"Oh, Gabriel, thank you! Thank you!" Morita stood in the doorway, arms crossed and smiling. "If our kid is half as amazing as you are, he's going to be the best."

" _She's_ going to be the best," corrected Morita, mostly for the sake of making the objection, because she didn't care if it was a girl or a boy. She just wanted to make sure Yoon didn't get her heart set on one possibility only for them to end up with the other.

"Don't celebrate yet," said Lorca, easing Yoon back down to the ground. "I have to do something first. I'll be gone a week. When I return."

She remained beaming. "I will make you the biggest feast of whatever you want!"

He thought a moment. "Octopus?"

"Octopus it is!" She hugged him again, minus the jumping this time, and when he walked away he could hear her squealing with delight and yelling, "We're having a baby!"


	40. You Can Never Go Back

Every time Lorca set foot on the Gabriella, there were more fortunes lining the wall. He could trace them all the way back to the first one she had saved: "If you fail to try, you never succeed." It was yellowed with age now, as were the ones around it, but the further along he went, the lighter the paper became. The most recent ones were still bright white.

Each one represented something they shared. Here was a dinner on a moon with a pink sky: "Don't wait for your ship to sail in, swim out to it." This one came from a meeting at a starbase: "Even the sky seems small from the bottom of a well." Lalana had taken a moment with that fortune and then recontextualized it in a way that fit Luluan: "You cannot see the limitless possibility of the sky from the bottom of an underground pond."

He knew which one was her favorite, but it took him a moment to find it. "To reach distant places, you must take the first step." She had loved that one the moment he opened it, and even though it had been his fortune, he agreed it was supposed to be hers and traded for "You have a magnetic personality." (A fortune so useless he hated it every time he saw it.)

Their sham marriage certificate was on the wall, too. "Heyliell" Lorla and Eleanor, as witnessed by Sollis and Caxus at the Winowa on Risa. He bit his lip against the grin forming on his face. It was his favorite paper on the wall. The way the registrar had looked, the outlandishness of it all as he and Lalana tried to one-up each other's lies. Her lies were bigger, truly, but the blatant fake coughing was what really made the performance soar.

Then he remembered why he was here on the Gabriella and the smile faded. It was time to go back. It was time to stop running.

Lorca sat down beside Lalana at the front of the ship and watched out the side window as the Buran vanished into the lines of starlight. He had a pair of cookies with him, as always.

"Live a life you love," read hers.

"Sometimes you just need a change in perspective," said his.

They ate their cookies together. "You know," he said, letting her wipe the crumbs off him with her tail (zero waste; this allowed her to eat the crumbs), "they finally figured out those molecules Umale sent the Federation."

"Oh? What were they?"

"Tree medicine."

Lalana clicked her tongue. "That makes good sense! He would not have sent medicine for people, since he does not like them, but all lului like trees. Even ones who choose to live on starships." She had a small garden, nothing like Yoon's setup on the Buran, but enough to provide a splash of living green in virtually every corner of the ship. "Are you tired? I know it is late on the Buran right now. I readied the cot for you."

The cot sat beneath the hammock she used as a bed when she slept, which he now knew was a rare event. Most of the time she only pretended to. It was a pretense he enjoyed. "I'll just watch the stars for a bit."

"They are beautiful, aren't they?" They seemed to be going by at a noticeably faster speed that usual. He said as much. "Oh, I have upgraded the engines again and rerouted most of the power to them. The Gabriella is much faster than a Starfleet vessel now. Or rather, you can go this speed, but I can maintain it for an entire journey, whereas you would burn out your engines or maybe worse. We are actually not going at top speed right now because I turned on some life support systems for you."

"So sorry to inconvenience you with my continuing need for _life_ ," he drawled at her in amusement, and she clicked laughter right back. "It is nice, though, having a starship captain at your beck and call."

"Oh, it is the best!" Though she had no ability to make any expression, he could tell she was smirking at him all the same.

He drummed his fingers on the console. "How about some music?"

"Yes! Space is so much better with a soundtrack."

He scrolled through her music archive. It just seemed to get bigger and bigger every time he saw it. Every world she visited, she took its music with her as a memento, more than probably even she could listen to in her lifetime, especially when she kept returning to the same few songs over and over.

He could have put on _God Only Knows_ and would have done it for her, but instead he picked an alternative they both liked.

" _Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy..._ "

* * *

Except for visits to Starfleet headquarters in San Francisco, Lorca had not set foot anywhere on Earth for over a decade. Seeing it now, that little blue-white swirl amidst the backdrop of the stars, he almost told Lalana to turn the ship around. A heavy weight had settled onto his shoulders. Nothing about this was easy.

Lalana had to get clearance to land her ship close to their destination. "I have a special dispensation," she informed traffic control, and transmitted the allowance she had been granted by the Federation to land her ship as needed on Federation worlds. Never transporting was a constant hassle. She always had to take the long way to get where she was going. Flight control supplied her with a path and they entered the atmosphere.

Most people felt elation, contentment at coming home. Lorca felt a mild sense of dread. He reached out and touched Lalana on the shoulder. "Slow down." Sometimes the long way was preferable.

"I am observing the speed—oh, this is not the problem, is it? I will slow us. But the destination is the same no matter how long we take to get there." For once, the fortune cookie sentiment was no comfort.

Lorca gave in to the urge to stand up and moved behind his seat, leaning against the headrest as the landscape began to resolve itself into familiar geography.

He was startled to see how much had not changed, and strangely upset to see how so much had. Familiar buildings were gone, unfamiliar buildings had appeared. Businesses had moved or closed and new ones opened. The steeple of the old church rose above the trees, but on the far side of it was some sort of fancy recreational center. There was the park he had gone to as a child, but gone was the playground, replaced by a large open field for sports. There was a new playground of an entirely different design where once had been a picnic area. He recognized the street where the first girl he'd kissed lived, but her house wasn't there.

He realized he was a stranger. The whole way here, he had been hoping the entire town was gone, replaced by something completely unrecognizable, and now it turned out he didn't want a single part of it to have changed. Every bit of it that changed was erasing some part of who he was, of who his parents had been.

He had been running away from a place that hadn't existed in years. Probably it had ceased to exist the moment he left. He inhaled shakily. He didn't want it to be erased, any of it. It felt like he was the one being erased, and so were his parents.

The ship landed in a small cargo port. The stiff December air had a cold bite to it that was entirely familiar. The particular mix of trees in the region, even in December when the world was cold and barren, gave the air a faint aroma completely unique to the region.

Lorca helped Lalana put on a heated thermal suit. Cold remained her greatest weakness. It reminded him a little of the first thing he'd seen her wearing, that puffy jumpsuit he'd helped her take off, but this time the clothing was specially designed to suit her range of motion, not restrict it, and it was a navy blue shade with white piping Lorca suspected Lalana had chosen as an homage to a Starfleet uniform.

They had clearance for twenty-four hours. The man at the cargo port was about the same age as Lorca. Had they gone to school together? Had they known each other? Did he recognize Lorca? If they had met, they had both grown so differently over the years, there was no recognizing either of them. Maybe this man had only moved to the town after Lorca left. Somehow, that was even worse, because Lorca's mind had never given this man permission to move here, and yet this man was not only present, he was less a stranger here than Lorca was.

When Lorca exhaled, he could see his breath in the cold air. "It's a bit of a walk. We can get a taxi."

"I do not mind," said Lalana.

Their path took them past places familiar and not. Lorca tried not to dwell too much on any of it but found himself slowing to look at the things that were familiar. A furniture store was entirely the same. Not the merchandise, but the name, the building, the sign above the windows. "We bought a couch there," he said. He had been maybe eight years old. While his father dealt with the salesman, Gabriel had run around, bouncing on cushions and yelling at his parents about which couches were good and which were not based solely on how high they bounced him. The salesman said kids did it all the time and laughed it off, but his father had not laughed in the slightest, not in the store, and not later that night.

Lorca hastily resumed walking. Lalana kept pace with whatever speed he chose and said nothing.

People looked at her, because they always looked at her wherever she went, but for once it was to their advantage. It meant no one really had time to notice or recognize him. He was just some man in a long grey coat with the collar turned up walking beside a non-humanoid alien. Some thought there was something familiar in those pale blue eyes fixed sternly straight ahead, but no one got a good enough look to be certain.

They made one stop, a coffee stand. He had them heat hers almost to boiling and she drank it at that temperature while he carefully sipped at his much cooler cup to avoid scorching his tongue.

The cups ended up crumpled in his pocket as they approached their destination. The one location in any town you could count on to remain mostly unchanged. Even in a world where absolutely nothing was sacred, the idea of building on such land was abhorrent because it was this bit of land that held the promise that one day, you, too, would be interred among your loved ones, and there for many centuries would you remain, protected by the same reverence you had shown to this land in your own lifetime.

Lorca stopped at the entrance gate to the cemetery and stared out at the many graves. They no longer buried people in these plots laying down. They stood them up to make more space for families to be together. Better still were those who chose to be interred as cremains, because they took up very little real estate indeed.

After a long minute, she finally spoke. "Hayliel?"

"I need a minute." He wasn't entirely sure which was the right row of graves. There seemed to be so many. He leaned against the side of the gate. "Shit. I don't know where they are." The magnitude of this statement hit him. He stared out the graves, helpless and lost.

* * *

She knew he was coming to Earth because he had said as much when he requested the week off. When his communicator pinged off the planetary relays, she expected him to call, but he didn't, so she did a quick check after an hour to see where exactly his communicator was. It was a mild abuse of power at most. Part of her just wanted fair warning before he turned up on her doorstep, as he had done twice before, once at a most inconvenient time.

When she saw where he was, she knew something was wrong. She grabbed her coat, ordered a transport, and beamed directly into the middle of town.

She spotted him immediately. He was getting coffee from a stand. He wasn't alone.

Cornwell decided against approaching. She hung back, staring at them from across the street, and watched as they made their way towards the outskirts of town.

She could track his communicator easily enough, but she only needed to check the map of the area to realize where he was going, because she had been there with him herself many years before. She could still remember the look on his face. Absent and distracted, like he wasn't fully present. As they placed the caskets into the ground, she couldn't really blame him for being mentally not there, because it was a lot to take in at the time.

What she could blame him for, and had done, was failing to deal with the aftermath of it. Despite her urging, despite her pleading, he had taken a stance of complete and utter denial and pretended nothing was wrong. "It's fine," he had told her, over and over and over again, until finally he stopped answering when she asked the question and accused her of being the one with the problem. When an assignment on a starship had taken him far away, he had never needed to listen to her ask the question ever again, and she had not tried since.

Twenty years was apparently how long it took him to ask the question of himself.

She trailed after them, watching the blip on her padd, wishing she had thought to grab a hat and a scarf, or maybe a coffee at that stand. She couldn't decide if she was doing this because she was his friend and she was worried about him, or because she was confused as to why he was there with Lalana instead of her. A little of both.

Cornwell didn't actively try to avoid being discovered. Sneaking around made what she was doing feel wrong. She walked out in the open, completely conspicuous in her Starfleet uniform coat with its piping and pips denoting her rank as admiral, and merely stayed far back enough that the question of whether she was spying on them was never quite raised. Not until they finally arrived at the cemetery and stopped moving. Then she watched from a distance as Lorca seemed to freeze at the cemetery gates, unable or unwilling to go farther.

She watched as Lalana stretched up against him with absolute ease, as if she had done this many times before, and wrapped her tail across his shoulder. It looked like she was whispering something into his ear. Then she withdrew, entered the graveyard, and began swiftly striding through the graves, turning her head as she did. Cornwell stepped behind a tree and waited until she heard a distant call of summons. When Cornwell peered back around the tree, she saw Lalana leading Lorca by the hand towards the side of the cemetery where his parents' graves were.

When Lorca wiped a hand across his face, Cornwell realized he was crying. When he knelt down and put his hand against the ground and Lalana brushed her tail across those same tears on his face, Cornwell decided she had made a terrible mistake giving in to her baser instincts and immediately called for a beam-out back to San Francisco.

She also realized something. It seemed crazy to her at first, but then it made a strange sense. Two years ago, Risa. A captain not in Starfleet.

It would have been a simple matter to check the ship's registry and confirm whether or not the Gabriella had been on Risa, but Cornwell decided against it. Enough was enough. He was entitled to whatever life he wanted to have.

* * *

Two days later, Lorca was in Cornwell's office, looking as good as she had ever seen him, smirking that impossible smirk at her. "Cutting it a little close, aren't you?" she asked. He was due back on the Buran in under forty-eight hours.

"I've got a fast ride," he said jovially. "I'll be back before the New Year. Now, you've got those science officers for me?"

She did, several candidates. They sat and reviewed them together. "Huh. Would you look at that. I've met this one, actually. Saru. He was on my ship. What was it, seven years ago? Triton, not the Buran."

"Did he make a good impression?"

Lorca squinted. "Can't say he did. Bit of the opposite." There was also the memory of hearing Saru argue with the person who had eventually ended up as Georgiou's first officer, Michael Burnham.

"I would strongly consider him, he's a good candidate with everything you're looking for."

"Sure," said Lorca noncommittally. "How about this one here. Andrea Basily."

"She's pretty," noted Cornwell.

Lorca blew a quick raspberry and pushed the padd with her file away. "Nevermind," he said, rolling his eyes.

Cornwell snorted. "I didn't mean you shouldn't pick her."

Lorca fixed Cornwell with a look. "You free tonight?"

After the cemetery, Cornwell had not expected him to express any interest. "Aren't you still seeing that captain? The one from Risa?"

"It's a _flexible_ situation," he said, beaming with what looked like genuine pride in this arrangement. He chuckled. "Come on, Kat."

Cornwell looked at him long and hard. Those twinkling eyes, the arc of his raised eyebrows, the crinkles of happiness on his face, that positively impish smile, the way he was tracing circles with his free hand on the table. She leaned her head on her hand and smiled at him. "Fine. But I'm in charge."

"You're the admiral, admiral."

* * *

Lorca invited Lalana to celebrate the new year on the Buran with the usual warning: "No stowing away."

"Seven years, you never let me forget," she said, but her hands were spinning. If he reminded her every day from now until the end of time, she would not mind it.

When the Gabriella jumped to warp two days later, Morita said, "I'm glad she finally got her ship. She spent so many years trying to make one..."

Lorca turned in his chair and blinked. "What?"

Morita looked equally confused. She thought no one knew Lalana better than him. "On Luluan. She kept trying to build her own spaceship after the invaders came the first time, and the other lului kept breaking it."

"She never told me that."

"Maybe she was embarrassed. I heard about it from Lualen."

Lorca turned back to the stars on the viewscreen. Lalana was right where she belonged, and so was he.


	41. War

If you don't want to have your heart broken, I would recommend skipping to chapter 43 once it is available.

If you are disturbed by graphic descriptions of violence, skip the scene that begins with "Three months later." The scene after it alludes to the content without the visuals.

Welcome to S1EP02 of Star Trek Discovery, the Battle at the Binary Stars.

* * *

2256.

The transmission went live across every ship in Starfleet. On the frontier between the Federation and the long-silent behemoth of the Klingon Empire, a battle had begun.

Set against a backdrop of binary stars, the natural debris field of the stars would have been beautiful were it not for the intermingling hulks of starships scattered across it. They drifted flickering and disabled. From gaping holes, bodies floated in silhouette against the binaries' yellow light.

The bridge crew of the Buran could only watch, powerless to help, as streaks of blue and green phaser fire and torpedoes danced across the screen. Brilliant yellow bursts of fire erupted across the hulls of the ships and were silenced info clouds of lifeless debris by the vacuum of space.

They could hear yells, both panicked and displaying incredible grace under pressure as crews struggled to survive the onslaught. It was horrible to hear the yelling, but more horrible still when the yelling stopped.

Carver's hands were over her mouth, tears streaming down her face. She whimpered. They could all see the carcass of the Yeager, and they knew Carver well enough to understand what she had just lost aboard the drifting vessel.

"Carver, you're relieved," said Lorca, as much for the sake of everyone else on the bridge as for Carver's own.

Carver hastily wiped her face with her sleeve. "Sir, I can—"

"Lieutenant Hamid, report to the bridge." Lorca put a hand on her shoulder. He gave the smallest nod when she looked up. She put her own hand over his in momentary thanks and desperately tried to keep her tears from becoming sobs as she stood and went to the turbolift, glad to be able to turn her back on the viewscreen.

Lorca did not have that luxury. He watched as the phasers and torpedoes continued across the screen.

Benford arrived in the same turbolift as Hamid, still pulling on his uniform tunic. His face was grim, but his manner calm. He joined Lorca by the viewscreen.

"We're too far away," said Lorca in a low voice. His eyes tracked weapons fire and he visibly winced as a captain misjudged a volley and another starship was racked by a line of torpedoes that split its hull in twain. "We're on the other side of the goddamn quadrant."

Benford mentally counted the wrecks they could see just in the view they had. It was far too many. Not all Starfleet, plenty of Klingons, too, but the balance was still against them.

The picture crackled and vanished. The ship they had been observing from was down. "Get me another signal!" Lorca barked. There was a flicker and a new view appeared, this one from further back, flickering and drifting slowly. This ship was already disabled, but still transmitting.

Then the Europa arrived, and with it Admiral Anderson. The Klingon ships fell back. It seemed the tide had turned.

"What's he doing?" scowled Lorca as the battle quelled.

"Negotiating," said Benford.

This did not seem right to Lorca. Even with the Europa, the Klingons had the advantage. The losing side in a battle did not open negotiations, they offered surrender.

Something pressed against the shields of the Europa. It was a flicker, momentary, and then the hull of the Europa seemed to peel like an orange. A field of green energy spread out from the point of impact. With it came the view of a Klingon ship so massive in scale it made the admiral's flagship look like a toy boat as the Klingon ship's keel split the Europa across half its length.

 _A cloaked ship._ An immense, incredible cloaked ship, the likes of which Lorca had never seen. No one had. It rivaled the size of a starbase. This was no mere starship, it was a battleship, of the formidable scale that had once belonged to the aircraft carriers in Earth's past. Every other ship was a skiff in comparison.

At the reveal of this flagship, the rush of Klingon ships into the fold was immediate. They warped in from every direction, scattering fire across the whole of the Federation fleet.

The Europa was not done yet. There was a line of blue fire and billowing pillows of red as the Europa voluntarily dropped its antimatter containment, creating a brilliant burst of yellow light that lit the sky like a new star for a fleeting moment.

The light faded. The Europa was no more. The Klingon flagship sat undaunted by the Europa's sacrifice.

The Federation was defeated. One by one, the Klingon vessels shot away at warp, leaving behind only the flagship.

The Klingon flagship began to broadcast.

"Members of the Federation. What you call your most remote borders, I call too close to Klingon's territory! You only live now to serve as witnesses of Klingon supremacy. To be my herald! We do not desire to know you, but you will know our great house, standing as one under Kahless reborn in me, T'Kuvma!"

"Jack," said Lorca, very quietly so only Benford could hear. Over the years, Lorca had expended a considerable amount of time and effort shielding Benford from dangers both physical and professional because Benford was one of his oldest friends and there was a little girl named Claire Anne counting on Lorca to always send her father home. She was adorable and sweet, with big brown eyes and soft curly hair. In 2253, she had been aboard the Buran while it was at Spacedock. This occasion had merited a full captain's tour of the ship. It was a big ship, and when her legs tired, Lorca picked her up and carried her. At some point, Cassidy snapped a picture of them, Claire grinning in elation in Lorca's arms while Lorca looked down at her, mid-sentence and clearly laughing. He loved that picture. It was right up there with the picture of him and Katrina on Mount Kilimanjaro.

This protection was a luxury he could no longer afford. "They're gonna need captains."

* * *

Cornwell arrived in her office to a message waiting. It was terse and directly to the point: "Get Benford a command."

* * *

Benford was assigned the USS Auckland. It was fresh off the production line and lacked the usual level of refinement and polish given to starships, but the important thing was that all its systems worked. A few unfinished edges wouldn't make a lick of different in combat.

To ease the transition, Benford took Russo and a smattering of second-shift bridge crew from various departments with him. Having a few familiar faces was a crucial component to getting the new ship up to speed. The shifts on the Buran would get a little longer, but no one gave this sacrifice a second thought.

"Fire straight and true," was Lorca's parting advice as he shook Benford's hand. Then Lorca called Arzo to his ready room.

The Tiburonian stood stiffly at attention. His face was as impassive as ever, but Lorca thought there was an edge of grimness to it that had not been there before.

"Arzo, I know you expected to have a ship all your own to command this year, and you are next in line to be first officer, but... I'm going with Morita."

"I agree with that decision completely," said Arzo. This was not a situation in which a science officer could expect to be granted a full command. While there were still science ships, there were no new science missions. Starfleet needed officers with tactical training in command. Arzo had experience in this area, but he was a scientist at heart, and he fully recognized the person Lorca needed at his side right now was Morita.

Morita barely reacted to the news. "Aye, sir," she said, and immediately returned to work.

* * *

Three months later.

Floating next to the blasted-out carcass of a Klingon Bird of Prey felt like a victory, but no one was cheering. The battle had been long, and wearying, and only very clever utilization of a gas cloud in the area had given the Buran the advantage necessary to take down the Klingon ship.

Lorca was exhausted. They all were. He hid it well. "Good job, everyone," he said simply. "Drop us to yellow alert."

As they scoured the debris for anything of use, a report came in. Kerrigan turned white as a sheet. "Mr. Kerrigan?" prompted Lorca.

"It's the Auckland," said Kerrigan. "It's..."

He didn't have to finish the sentence. A ripple of grief spread across the bridge and flickered out. Yes, that was Benford's ship, and yes, they had just lost friends, but they had lost so many friends at this point. Every report brought news of people they knew, people they had worked with, people they had gone to Academy with, people they loved, people who were now dead.

"Get me the crew manifest," said Lorca, sounding callous out of necessity. They did not have the luxury of stopping right now to grieve. When the salvage of the Klingon ship was done, Lorca would say a few words to everyone and then they would get right back into the fight. That was how they recognized their fallen comrades: by fighting to keep the Federation alive. He would say a few more words than usual, because these were people they knew and loved more than most, but that was all.

Then the next report came in, labeled captain's eyes only. Lorca retreated to his ready room.

It was a report that had been sent to all Starfleet captains to keep them appraised of the situation. It was not the sort of report you passed along to your crew, and when he looked at the images inside, Lorca knew the report had been sent to him only because whoever sent it had not checked to see who precisely the report was being sent to, or had simply not known or understood the history between the captains of the Auckland and the Buran.

There was Benford, there was Russo. They were bloodied and bruised and looked half dead. They were being paraded down a street on Qo'noS to a jeering, taunting crowd that prodded them with bladed weapons and bared its ugly teeth in their direction. Lorca also recognized the corpse of Onnara Doss, who had been a security officer on the Buran, being dragged like a trophy by the leg. She was dead. There was another officer impaled on a spear. Not a former Buran crewman, an unknown face from the Auckland. His entrails were spooling down the length of the spear.

In a later image, Russo's throat was cut and he was dead. There was no sign of what had happened to Benford. Lorca guessed Russo was the luckier of the two.

He was not surprised when Cornwell called. "That report should not have been sent to you."

"It was for all Starfleet captains. I'm a Starfleet captain."

"It should have been censored before it was sent."

"Do you think I don't know what Klingons do to prisoners, Katrina?" There had been rumors. This was the confirmation.

They talked on for five minutes more, reaching no further point in the conversation, and then Cornwell's attention was needed elsewhere.

Lorca stood in his ready room, arms crossed, and felt nothing. There was nothing left to feel. He sent a cursory message of regret to Cassidy—text only, so she wouldn't see the lack of reaction—and returned to the bridge. The image of Benford was burned into his mind.

* * *

He waited until their regularly scheduled return to uncontested space to contact Lalana. "I'm sorry if you've heard this already, but... Jack and everyone under his command, including Eraldo... they're dead." There was no feeling in his voice. His face was blank.

"Are you alright? I know how much Jack meant to you."

Whatever Jack had meant, none of it registered on Lorca's face. His emotions were something distant and faraway. He spoke as calmly as she once had describing another lului having its tongue docked. "This is war. People die."

Lalana knocked her fingers together. His answer, and most especially his face, did not please her. "I am very sorry that they sent the visuals unedited. If I had known they would send them to you, I would have modified them myself before they reached Starfleet."

He barely reacted. Those files were classified. Highly. The images were explosive, and graphic, and while some had eventually leaked with identifying details removed, the fact that they had gone to every Starfleet captain unedited was not public knowledge because no one wanted to think about it, much less acknowledge to anyone what they had seen. "What are you saying?"

"Hayliel," she said, softly. "Where do you think the visuals came from?"

His mouth went dry. "What." He swallowed as best he could. "What?" he said, louder, and then, "Where are you?" in a tone so accusatory, it was practically a conviction.

"I cannot tell you that."

His eyes went wide and his face was white, but this was not fear. This was the only emotion he had to fall back on right now, and it was a culmination of everything he had experienced in recent weeks which had been pent up inside him unexpressed. "You told me," he said, and there was a shake in his chest as his right hand clenched into a fist, "that you would go to Trill."

"I did."

Did she mean she had said it, or that she had gone there and then left? It didn't matter. Either or both of these things were wrong to him on a fundamental level.

" _You told me you would stay out of this!_ "

"I could not stand by and let them hurt the Federation."

He screamed at her with everything he had and slammed his fist against the table. "You don't get to decide that! That's not how this works!"

"Hayliel—"

Just hearing her say that name filled him with new rage. "Don't," he snarled at her. His jaw was clenched so tightly his teeth hurt.

She waited a moment, and then said with an emotional intensity he had never seen from her before, "Did you give me the stars so you could tell me what to do? You made your choice to serve Starfleet. I make my own choices, Gabriel. You do not decide for me. No one decides for me except me."

"Then we're done," he said, and terminated the transmission.

The ready room was quiet. He reached for the only thing in arm's reach, a fortune cookie, and smashed it against the table with such force he cut his hand on the shards of the cookie. The paper inside read, "Be open to advice from those worthy of your trust." He did not look at it. He balled it up in his hand and threw it in the trash.


	42. The Buran

_A/N: Welcome, to the long-awaited moment. Again, if you do not want your heart broken, skip to the next chapter when it's available._

 _I couldn't bear to interfere with fortune given what is looming over the horizon, so this was another "pulled it and used it" blind draw._

 _Additionally, I have glossed over the exact details of the Buran event given that the show may reveal more about it, and I don't want to be too locked in to anything descriptively. If further details come out in the show, expect revisions accordingly (and I will announce any changes accordingly)._

* * *

"Captain, may I speak to you?"

Ek'Ez was out of sickbay again. Lorca said nothing and went immediately into his ready room with the doctor. This time, he did not provide the courtesy of sparing Ek'Ez a view of the stars. It was not an intentional slight. He had to remain behind the desk in order to keep an eye on the bridge from his desk console. Even a split second of inattention could cost them the advantage if they were attacked.

"Let's hear it," said Lorca.

Ek'Ez's eyes were blinking in rapid discomfort. "Captain, I do not know what the right course of action is." For a doctor who had taken several courses on ethics and morality in his training, Ek'Ez seemed to run into a lot of moral quandaries he was unable to solve on his own. Perhaps it was a case of too much knowledge getting in the way of decision-making. Paralysis of choice. "But I believe there is a medical situation aboard which may necessitate your intervention. The issue is, if I tell you about it, even the slightest details, it will be a gross violation of doctor patient confidentiality."

"This is war," said Lorca, a sentence he was getting tired of telling people. "We don't have time for pleasantries. Is someone on my crew compromised?"

"That is the problem, captain. The issue, while medical in nature, is not of the sort that would affect the performance of the individual in question, professionally-speaking, but there are... other factors in play which may merit the removal of the individual from the ship."

Ek'Ez was using a lot of words to say very little. Lorca rubbed at the bridge of his nose. "Ek, you're gonna have to give me more than that."

"If someone has a medical condition which is not life-threatening and does not affect their work, are they entitled to their privacy if there is a chance their condition may affect others?"

"Are you saying this person has something contagious?"

"No, not at all. But, this person's continued presence on the ship would endanger another by exposure. And owing to the nature of the exposure, it is not possible to separate the person who is endangered from the person who is causing the danger. Or rather, it would be, but the person with the power to remove the danger refuses to do so."

The more explanation Ek'Ez offered, the more convoluted and confusing the scenario became. "If someone on the crew is endangering someone else on the crew, doctor, that would constitute valid grounds for you to tell me what the hell is going on."

"What if the endangered person is not a member of the crew?"

Lorca's eyes went wide. "Are you telling me we have a stowaway on onboard?"

"I would not term it like that, captain, no."

"Dr. Ek'Ez. If Lalana is on board this ship, you need to tell me _now_." There was absolutely no questioning that tone.

Ek'Ek's eyes blinked in a line of confusion and surprise. "Lalana? Why would Lalana be on the ship?"

Lorca relaxed slightly. "She does have a history." She had also apparently appointed herself some sort of Starfleet intelligence operative, meaning she might potentially fit the description of personnel who were not crew.

"I have not seen Lalana in person in some years. I merely offer her medical advice when she contacts me. I assure you, captain, no one unauthorized has come aboard to the best of my knowledge. Perhaps I should consult with Commander Benford instead."

Ek'Ez's wording was very slippery. Someone endangered who was not a member of the crew, had not come aboard, and yet could not be separated from the danger posed by a crew member. Lorca realized why Ek'Ez was being so slippery. The mere nature of the question made obvious the patient. "I thought that was on ice for now."

All four of Ek'Ez's eyes went wide. In his desire to seek the captain's counsel, he had said too much. "Captain, as I am bound by doctor-patient confidentiality..." Ek'Ez pressed his hands together. He looked and sounded dejected. "Which I fear I have just broken..."

There was a time and a place for confidentiality, Lorca decided, and this was not it. The reason had nothing to do with him being captain. In fact, he strongly suspected the only reason he had not been brought into the loop sooner was because he was the captain, and he had the power to put an end to it if he chose to do so, and they did not want that power of choice taken away from them.

"Ak'vek'mov," said Lorca. He very, very rarely used Ek'Ez's given name, which was a clear indicator of the seriousness of this. "You're not just responsible for the physical welfare of this crew, but their mental welfare, too. Clearly, we are dealing with compromised mental welfare here."

There was shame in Ek'Ez's voice, but also desperation to defend himself. "But can we truly say someone is psychologically compromised merely because we don't agree with their decisions? They may have sound reasons."

"People always think their reasoning is sound, especially when it isn't," said Lorca.

"I... apologize, captain. Truly I have failed you. The mental states of others have never been my strong point. And... the patient suggested the war would end and render the question moot."

That was the most recklessly optimistic thing Lorca had ever heard. He half-sighed, half-growled. "Get back to sickbay, doctor. And... It isn't your fault. They put you in an impossible situation."

He took a deep breath and stood with his hands pressed against his desk for a few moments before he made the call.

She arrived looking confused as to why she was there. "Is something the matter, captain?"

"I didn't call you here as your captain, Daisy." He pushed the bowl of fortune cookies in her direction. She timidly took one, unable to hide the trepidation she felt.

Lorca remembered what he had said to Benford on the day of the Buran's launch, the tactic he had tried to live by in the years following. Stand to keep them on their toes, sit to make them comfortable. If he could have afforded the inattention to the bridge, he would have taken her to the conference room right then and there. Had Benford been on the bridge when his ship had been captured? Or had it been during the precious six hours or less every captain had to allot for sleep? Had Benford been eating or showering or any of the other million little necessary distractions? Had he been paying attention? Had it been at all a preventable tragedy?

Yoon ate her cookie. She glanced at the fortune but did not read it aloud. _Collaborate with those who possess both intelligence and integrity._ She shook faintly.

If she had not understood the reason for her presence when she walked in, she certainly seemed to have figured it out now.

"Is there something you want to tell me, Daisy?"

Clearly the answer to that was no, she did not want to tell him, but equally clearly she had to. She shivered like a leaf. "I'm sorry, I tried, I swear I tried, but it was all so sudden, and then I couldn't explain why I hadn't said anything in the first place..." Tears dripped down her cheeks. "And every day it got more and more hard to explain why I hadn't said anything..."

"Then why didn't Reiko tell me?"

Yoon hiccoughed through her tears.

Lorca inhaled slowly. Surely not. Surely she hadn't...

"I was going to make her a fancy meal and surprise her with the news and then... everything happened all at once."

Fourteen weeks. The timeline had to be fourteen weeks because that was when the war had started. She had managed to hide this from her own _wife_ for fourteen weeks. How, he didn't know. There was no significant visible change from where he was standing, but even with the long shifts and everything happening, surely Morita still saw Yoon naked on a regular basis.

But they were under an immense amount of stress. Everyone looked and felt different these days. Maybe it was possible to go fourteen weeks without knowing, mentally excusing the signs as being stress, not what they really were. Or maybe they weren't sleeping together as they used to. The shifts were bad, the stress was high, and Yoon had reason to avoid anything that might tip Morita off.

Lorca pressed his fingers against the bridge of his nose. "I should have put you on leave the minute you started this course of action." But at the time, the circumstances had not been extraordinary, so there was no need to pull her from duty just for trying to get pregnant. There wasn't normally cause to pull someone from duty for pregnancy until they requested it.

On some level he was furious with Yoon. Mostly he was just empty. "We're getting you off this ship. And you're telling Reiko now. Not tonight, not tomorrow. Do I make myself clear?"

She sniffled, but nodded. "She's going to hate me. _I_ hate me." She began to sob.

There wasn't quite room in Lorca's mind for genuine compassion, but he managed something approximating it. "She'll be happy and angry, but she won't hate you."

It was pitiful watching her. Lorca went into the bathroom, risking eight seconds of less-than-constant bridge vigilance, and returned with a cloth for Yoon to wipe her face with.

Yoon dabbed at her eyes. "People are going to think I did this intentionally to get out of this war." Medical records would say otherwise, but people did tend to think and say the worst when they did not have all the facts.

"Daisy, anyone who goes so far as to get pregnant to avoid combat shouldn't be in this war to begin with." The fact that she had stayed in it for fourteen weeks despite the circumstance beggared belief.

"If something happens to Reiko and I'm not here..."

"You'll live, and so will... she?"

"He. It's a boy."

* * *

Lorca called Morita to the ready room and went out onto the bridge and sat in the captain's chair, pensively chewing on his lip. They couldn't leave this area, there had been several active Klingon sightings, and it was probably a bad idea to send Yoon off on a shuttle in light of that.

Something occurred to him. He began to compose a message.

 _Lalana: I don't know where you are, but if you're out there, I need you to come and get Daisy from the Buran. Please. I'm sorry for what I said. You have every right to fight this war with us._ He encrypted it on a classified top secret subspace band and hoped it reached her.

Whether she got the message, he did not know. He did not receive a response. After a few minutes, Arzo offered a sharp tone of alarm:

"Captain, we're detecting an energy signature."

These days, the slightest sign of trouble was enough to draw Lorca up from his chair, and he jumped up and strode towards the science station in two long steps, half his attention still on the viewscreen for any sudden sign of trouble. "Klingon?"

Arzo operated the controls swiftly, working hard to compensate for some sort of interference. "Unknown. Possibly. I am having trouble locking on. The signal is intermittent."

"What's your analysis? Malfunctioning cloak?"

"That is one possibility. It may also be a spatial anomaly, but..."

"Spatial anomalies," said Lorca bitterly. Those weren't something starships encountered any more. "Yellow alert. Contact the nearest starbase and inform them of our situation."

Over at the communications console, Kerrigan's brow furrowed. "Sir. We're being jammed!"

"Red alert!"

* * *

"Sir, we're losing—"

"Systems critical!" cried Levy.

"I can't—" Morita screamed as the console exploded in her face, throwing her backwards with plasma burns. Yoon was still on the bridge and dropped down beside Morita, putting an arm around Morita's shoulders and helping her up.

Everything was going wrong around them. Every system alarm was blaring and the crew was frantically trying to contain what was happening from every possible angle. An explosion from the warp core rocked the ship, pitching Lorca forward because he was standing as always, never mind the reckless danger. There was a tremendously bright light. Lorca's hand closed around something.

* * *

There was a massive explosion. The Buran split apart as if every conduit had suddenly burst all at once, destroying the ship from within with a massive chain reaction of fire, plasma, and light. It was so bright it was enough to blind. Ribbons of energy spewed across the cosmos.

Amidst the chaos a single escape pod went flying outwards. For a moment, it seemed the escape pod would not make it. Bright blue energy overtook the pod, sweeping across its surface with a crackle of burning intensity. The pod held and hurtled onward into the darkness, towards the uncertain pinpricks of distant stars. It disappeared into the distance, lost.

Only as the waves of energy and pulses of light dwindled to their inevitable conclusion did the full extent of the destruction become apparent. The remains of the Buran and a Klingon cruiser were almost impossible to distinguish. They had been reduced to chunks of metal like shrapnel, barely anything left of their bones.

Amidst the debris drifted a well-worn copy of _Twenty-Thousand Leagues Under the Sea_ , its cover and pages charred halfway to stardust, no trace remaining of the fortune that had once lain between pages fifty and fifty-one.


	43. Tumbling Down

The escape pod's transponder blipped into the darkness until it was finally picked up by a Federation starship investigating the disappearance of the Buran. The life sign within was so faint it barely registered on sensors.

In all that destruction, one single survivor.

He was crumpled up like a fortune that had been thrown in the trash. His face and hands were blue and dusted with ice crystals. A damaged data core was clutched in his fingers so tightly they could not pry it loose. He was so cold, he barely shivered, and his breath did not register in the air as even the faintest bit of fog.

But he was alive. Somehow, by some miracle, Gabriel Lorca was alive.

* * *

He could hear voices talking over him.

"...his authorization codes."

"He blew up his own ship?"

"I can't believe he abandoned his crew."

"Abandoned them? He killed them."

They did not realize he was awake yet. He groaned and immediately the voices were beside him, hovering over him. "Captain Lorca," one was saying, "stay still. You're on the..."

"I had to," he gasped, writhing with his eyes squeezed shut against the pain. "We were overrun—the Klingons—captured everyone—what they do—to prisoners—"

The medical technicians had not seen the unedited pictures, only two heavily redacted ones that had gone public. In those picture, it was impossible to tell for certain what was happening to the bodies, but everyone knew by rumor and reputation what lay beneath the censorship.

"Stay calm, sir, just try to relax. You're safe now."

Someone injected him with something and everything faded away.

* * *

The next time he awoke, he was in a sickbay, the lights a blaring fire against the surface of his eyes. The pain was excruciating. He yelled, "My eyes!" and thrashed, covering his face with his arm in agonized frustration. "The lights! Get them off! Turn them off!" It was a command, it was a plea, it was pure, unbridled desperation.

They did not turn off the lights. They injected him again and he collapsed once more into an empty hole of unconsciousness.

* * *

He could not see, but he could tell he was no longer on a starship. There was no subtle thrum of ship engines, no sounds of beeping monitors or faint rustling of the uniforms of busy personnel. His nostrils flared. The sterile smell of sickbay had been replaced by something slightly dusty. The air was filtered, but wherever he was, there were enough solid particulates floating around that some quantity of them escaped the filters. There was something over his eyes. A bandage.

A voice, soft and high and translator-rendered, spoke his name: "Gabriel?" He turned his head, trying to discern the direction of the source with his eyes covered. "I am here." He located her, somewhere off to his right. Distance unclear.

Something brushed against his hand and he jerked back in surprise. His voice was hoarse and whispery. "I can't—I can't see you."

"They said you damaged your eyes."

"Ship... exploded," he managed. "I saw it." He leaned his head back against the pillow. "I saw it. It was..." He shook his head faintly. Then he jerked upright with a gasp. "Data core!"

It had taken them hours to thaw it out of his fingers safely, but for naught. "It was destroyed. The data was not retrievable."

He sank back down with a long, weary sigh. "Everything was for nothing."

"It was not. You are here. That is something."

It was hard, being unable to see her.

"Do you want me to take off the bandages? They said I could. The lights are dim."

"Yes," he said, with a sense of urgency. He hated being blinded. He hated feeling helpless, unaware, diminished by the loss of a key sense. Slowly, she undid the closure of the bandage, her touch feather-light, and the gauzy cloth fell away.

The light was dim and blue, and so was she, save for the unblinking intensity of her giant green eyes. She was perched on a chair an arm's length away from his bed. The long curve of her tail stretched up behind her.

They stared at each other. She asked, "Why did you send me that message? That you needed me to come and get Da Hee?"

He stiffened. "We don't need to get into that now." Or ever, if he had any choice about it.

"I am sorry I was not fast enough. I am sorry for all of your crew. I liked them very much, especially Da Hee and Reiko, but I was fond of them all."

He turned away, unable to look at her any longer. "I don't need you to remind me they're dead." His fists clenched. "I killed them. I had to. If I didn't, then the Klingons, they'd..."

"They would have ended up like Jack, and Eraldo."

"Go away," he said, voice almost choking. "I just want to be alone."

"Gabriel, look at me." He could not. She stretched her tail towards him and he flinched away. "I more than anyone understand why you would choose a death for your crew, given the alternative the Klingons would have presented. A captain bears a responsibility to his crew."

A responsibility he had failed in. "Just go away," he said. "I don't want you here."

She sat there, looking at him thoughtfully. It was not so long ago that she had recited for Lorca the entirety of Twenty Thousand Leagues from memory, which had impressed him. When your entire body was a brain, you had an ample quantity of memory storage at your disposal, and could remember those things which you found truly important.

It did not seem appropriate to repeat this story now. Instead, she chose another. "I am going to tell you a story," she said. "Once upon a time there was a lului named Lalana."

She began the story on Luluan, nine hundred and fifty years earlier, but there was not much remarkable in that. For many hundreds of years, she ran around the forest and observed the trees and insects and worms, until the fateful day that visitors came from above. News of their arrival spread like a ripple of water across the interior of the planet. Yet where her people saw heretical invaders, she saw something entirely different, something strange and beautiful, a possibility of the beyond. When she saw their spaceship return to orbit, "All she wanted from that moment was to see it herself," Lalana said. "She wanted to go to the place where they came from."

It was a story Larsson would have appreciated. Focused as he had been on the history of her people, he had missed many of the tiny wondrous details that were specific to her experience, details that did not matter in the grand planetary scheme of things, but mattered to her.

She told of how she stalked the hunters, hunting them in her own way, searching for the ones who did not kill, and then she had gone with Margeh and T'rond'n. The time she spent with them was a highly limited adventure, but satisfying in its own way. "Meeting so many guests and seeing so many strange animals at their compound, she realized the full extent of what was out there and she had to go and see it for herself. And so, she stole their spaceship and flew it to the stars."

"She knew how to do two things. She could make the engines go, and broadcast a transmission. She did both. She did not know what she would find or who she would encounter, but being able to run was enough. To run to the stars as she had long dreamed to."

"And then, in what humans would call a miracle, and what we lului would call a million tiny steps, he heard her. He heard her, and he answered."

It was not just her story, it was his, too.

"He had a halo of stars around him, and he was unlike every other human, because he did not merely feel things. When he laughed, he _became_ laughter. When he smiled, he _became_ joy. And he was warm to the touch, and so funny. She knew from that moment on that she could watch him forever and never tire of it."

She told him how he tricked the Dartarans with a plan so complex its simplest aspects would have eluded other Starfleet captains, how he led his crew into the dangerous jungle and protected them, how he tempted fate and took chances and convinced her not to give up after she had murdered the leskos. (Her term, of course, not his.) She told him how he hid in a shower, bested space pirates, danced at dinner, pretended a marriage, killed a Gorn, swam in a glowing hot spring, and attended a planetary conference, laughing every step of the way. How he never stopped, never looked back, always went charging forward. How they ate fortune cookies, spoke in fortune cookies, traded insights for jokes, and laughed so many times for so many reasons.

There were details, too, that would never have been known from his perspective. "She offered to go and get him, but when she found him, he was very much occupied with Serot!" She clicked her tongue. "It seemed to be quite enjoyable for them, and so she resolved to learn how to do such things herself."

Then, after a concert on Risa, came the goodbye she did not want, followed by Dr. Li's experiment gone awry. For much of that, she had been asleep, but when she woke, she made good on her resolution, and he took command of the Buran.

Lorca's face twisted with guilt and grief at the mention of the Buran. His ship and his crew were gone. Irreversibly and eternally gone. But even knowing the Buran's ultimate fate, he would not trade the memory of seeing it for the first time and knowing it would be his for anything.

"And he flew off to have many adventures, and she did the same." The story had been going three hours now. It sounded as if she was coming to the end. "Even though they were very far apart, they were in some sense always together, because so long as they were both surrounded by the stars, they were in the same ocean."

She fell silent. He spoke his first words in three hours. "And then what happened?"

Her tail drifted back and forth behind her, shifting as if touched by an invisible breeze. "You should rest."

"I'll rest, just keep talking." He finally looked in her direction. His eyes were tired, almost expressionless from weary exhaustion.

She tilted her head. "Do you want me to tell you about all the worlds we visited, or the Gabriella, or when we went back to Risa?"

"Yes," he said. "All of it."

Another hour went by. His face remained a void, exhausted and impassive, but he listened as she won a small fortune in a game of chance arranged by Peter Bhandary for her benefit. Bhandary fronted her the buy-in to sit at the table and rub elbows with people who were so rich and powerful they thought nothing of gambling away whole systems worth of wealth, or even considered the wealth she walked away with as anything worth remembering. She repaid Bhandary twice over and used the rest to buy herself the Gabriella.

A medical attendant came in, delivered food and water, said they were waiting on a transport to arrive. Lorca scarcely acknowledged the information. The attendant left and Lalana continued. Now they were on Risa, tricking a wedding officiate at the Winowa.

He ate very slowly, but he finished the food. He watched her now when she spoke, with a haggard intensity that erased all other thoughts. They were two people, in a room, listening to a story, and the rest of the universe was none of their concern.

"As they stood at the gates of the cemetery, she said to him, 'I will carry you, if I have to,' the same words he had spoken to her on the moon on Tederek. And then she found the graves for him, so he did not have to, and he knelt down..."

The war began. She went to Qo'noS, secreted away on a Klingon ship undetected, and escaped off the planet again with evidence of the Klingon's brutality and information on their ships.

"She had meant to comfort him for his loss, but he was angry. He did not see what she had done as a gift. He saw it as a betrayal. He yelled at her with a fury that seemed like the fury he described as his father's."

Her hands knocked and her fur began to writhe faintly. "He was so angry she did not know if he would ever speak to her again. Certainly, he did not contact her for several days, but then he wrote to her and asked her to come, and in his message he said he was sorry." Her fur had taken on a life of its own and she slid her tail down over her eyes. "And she wrote back to him and said, he had no need to be sorry. He only needed to live, so that she could see his face again. So that she could see his face again! Because all she wanted was to see his face!"

She shook violently and balled herself up on the chair, her tongue trilling softly.

He swung his legs down from the bed and reached towards her. "Lalana." His fingers brushed the wriggling mass of her surface and jerked back. It was impossible not to be startled by the sensation of the fur's movement. He swallowed and pushed past the fear. His hand settled against her back. "I'm right here."

She looked up and saw the face she had fallen in love with, the expression twisted with lonely desperation. In addition to this, she also saw in him something of a promise, and perhaps even the faintest glimmer of hope.

"I'm right here."

* * *

He was ready for transport. Back to Earth, they said, to see what could be done about his eyes and give him time to properly recover. Lalana had gone to make arrangements for her ship so she could travel with him. For the moment, he was forgotten in a dimmed section of sealed corridor, waiting for the medical transport to land. He lay in the mobile cot and closed his eyes, listening to sounds in the distance.

Someone walked by. He thought nothing of it at first, but then the safety doors slid open. He instinctively covered his eyes at the light beyond.

The doors slid shut again. He moved his arm to see who had entered.

It was Sarah Billingsley. She stood motionless at the foot of the cot, staring at him. "Captain Lorca."

There was something in her voice, something unkind, but the tone was inconsequential compared to the expression on her face. Of all the things she could have looked at him with, she had chosen by far the cruelest: pity.

"I was mad at you for so long, you know. The way you dumped me at Spacedock? What an idiot I was. I should have known better than to sleep with the captain."

He didn't say anything. There wasn't anything for him to say.

"I hated you for so long, but now..."

He waited for the other shoe to drop, for her to lash out and say he had gotten what he deserved, to call the loss of his ship and his crew some sort of justice for the way she had been treated, for her to tell him he had gotten exactly what he deserved.

He had fundamentally misunderstood what this conversation was about.

"You did me a favor. I didn't realize it then, but I do now." Her face was so calm, so perfectly poised and full of disdain for the wretched creature before her. "Everything you touch dies."

Billingsley punched the door controls so the light flooded in. He covered his eyes and she walked out.


	44. When the Bough Breaks

She checked in with the doctors first, so there would be no surprises.

"Overall the prognosis is good, admiral," said the senior doctor on staff. "No lasting damage from the hypothermia. He's been up and about. Refused any intervention for his eyes. We're just keeping him a week for observation."

As Cornwell scrolled down the chart, she noted the recent doses of sedatives. Three days of full sedation for confusion and delirium. Two days of mild sedatives since, stated reason insomnia. She mentioned it to the doctor.

"No natural sleep cycle as yet, but with the travel and schedule disruption, that's not unusual."

"Can you forward me a copy of any updates to his condition?" It was easy to get around confidentiality when you had the double privilege of being both the ranking medical officer and a personal medical proxy.

"Certainly, admiral. I'll set it to update you automatically. Second to last door on the right. Mind you knock first, he gets awfully cranky if you let in too much light."

There was his name on the door: LORCA, G. Cornwell knocked with a sense of trepidation. After a moment, an answer: a vaguely annoyed yell.

The room was dim, the window covered. He was sitting in bed with his hand covering his eyes. "Well are you gonna close the door?" he demanded, waiting.

She closed it and he lowered his hand. Surprised recognition registered on his face. "Katrina!" He also seemed to realize his initial responses had been slightly inappropriate. "I thought you were the nurse."

"Then you should be nicer to the nurse," she said dryly.

He started to smile, but it vanished. He closed his eyes even though the low light was not a bother and turned his head slightly away with a look of pained regret. For a brief moment, he had forgotten what had happened and almost allowed himself to be happy.

She thought he would recover from the emotion and forgive himself for the momentary slip in his grief, but instead his face contorted with anguish and he squeezed his fist against his forehead, inhaling through clenched teeth. As he exhaled, his jaw unclenched and he began to breathe slowly, breaths shuddering as his hand relaxed again.

Cornwell sat down on the end of the bed, by his feet, watching and waiting. After a few slow breaths, his breathing evened out and he entered a state of weary calm. He licked his lips, opened his eyes, and poured himself a cup of water from the pitcher beside the bed.

"It's alright," said Cornwell, putting her hand on his leg just below the knee.

"Nothing's alright," he said, taking a decent swig of water and swallowing it slowly. "They're dead. Every one of them. And for what? The data we had, their ships, their positions, it didn't survive. There was no point. I should've just stayed on the ship." His lips pressed together. His face, always so expressive, revealed a terrible regret at his own survival.

Cornwell's heart broke to see him like this. "What you're feeling is perfectly natural," she told him.

He shook his head, staring at nothing. "It's not natural for a captain to outlive his ship, his crew." He looked at her. "That's not natural."

His eyes were so wide, so scared. He was begging her to explain why he had survived when everyone else had not. Cornwell moved her hand from his leg towards the hand laying limply at his side that just a minute ago had been a fist. She curled her fingers around it and squeezed. He squeezed back, just barely, with a tremble.

"I'm here for you," Cornwell said, genuine and sincere down to the very fibers of her being. "As much time as you need."

"Now that's not very realistic," said Lorca, in some semblance of a pitiful joke, "there's a war out there needs you, too. Maybe more than I do." He sniffed, his nose sounding stuffy for reasons she could well imagine. "Admiral. And what kind of captain would I be if I got in the way? Not that I am a captain, 'cause a captain's got a ship, and I don't have that." Tears sprang to the corners of his eyes. He gasped once, twice, and started to cry.

Cornwell embraced him, brushed her fingers across his hair and held him close as he sobbed into her shoulder.

"I don't know who I am without my ship!"

"I know who you are, Gabriel," she said, leaning her head against his. "I know exactly who you are."

His first words when the tears were gone were, "I'm sorry." They sat facing each other, holding hands.

"Don't be," said Cornwell. "You're allowed to feel what you're feeling. I know I said this already, but maybe this time you'll listen. It's normal and natural." It was also important to provide as much of a feeling of normalcy as she could, and that meant reminding him of who they were individually and together by pushing him just slightly as she always did. "You need to give yourself time."

The look on his face bordered on despondent. "I'm not sure that's a luxury we have."

* * *

He didn't have to review the personnel files because he knew them all by heart. He knew, for example, that Da Hee Yoon was one of four children, and that her mother cultivated orchids, which was where she had gotten her interest in edaphology from. He knew equally well that her wife, Reiko Morita, was an only child, and the call to Morita's parents had been brutal, but he went through and made the calls one by one. He sat there as parents, husbands, wives, children, brothers, sisters, and relations less clear yelled and screamed at him for his surviving what their loved ones had not, or cried and wailed to him to express the overwhelming loss they felt, or sat and said nothing because they had distanced themselves so far from their feelings they had no ability to express anything, or hung up on him immediately or midway through. Most sat and listened, quietly crying as he told them how wonderful their lost son, daughter, sibling, parent, or lover had been, and how special the contribution that person had made as a crewmember on the Buran, and how immensely he regretted their deaths.

The easiest ones were when they simply didn't pick up, either because they weren't there or saw his name on the ident and relegated him to a video recording.

Lalana sat in the corner, occasionally suggesting details he might mention about those crewmembers she had known, and listened and watched.

Some people, despite everything, were kind to him.

"Our son loved serving on your ship," said Mrs. Kerrigan. "You take care of yourself, captain. It's what Matthew would have wanted. And call us if you need anything."

Lorca scrunched his face, eyes watering, and nodded as he hung up, knowing absolutely that he would never speak with them again. A deep breath cleared him of the intrusion of emotion and he began the next call.

This went on for hours, until he had exhausted local times when it would be appropriate to call and himself. He drifted off into an uneasy sleep.

Soon after, he awoke, screaming as hands held him down and administered a sedative. "Buran," he mumbled as the sedative took effect. "I should be... Buran." His hands curled as if clutching for the destroyed data core, but there was nothing there.

The next day, more calls. Cornwell came back, of course, but when he said what he was doing and asked her to leave, she complied with only the briefest glance at Lalana's hunched form in the room's corner.

As he finished off a call in which Levy's father had bitterly admonished him for not bringing his daughter home, Lorca decided to take a break. He took the spray they had given him to counteract the pain and the brightness and winced at the odd sensation of squirting it into his eyes. It took him a couple tries to get the coverage right, but when he opened the door, the lights of the hallway were no trouble at all.

He went for a walk. Lalana offered her company, but he declined.

It was a cloudy day, warm but very windy, the sea air whipping around him as he headed in the direction of the bay. The Starfleet Headquarters complex had some of the best real estate in the city. The view across the water towards the bridge was incredible.

A sensation on his neck told him he was being followed. He turned and looked, but saw no one. He continued on along the seaside walkway that led towards a forested park. If any of the other pedestrians he passed recognized who he was, they did not give any indication, and he was not accosted by anyone. Perhaps he was not recognizable without his uniform. The black undershirt and loose hospital pants could have belonged to someone of any rank or role in Starfleet.

Lorca felt it again. He was being followed.

He glanced around, saw no one looking in his direction, and left the walkway, heading off into the trees.

He heard a branch overhead and paused, looking up and around. "Who's there?"

It was Lalana, of course. She identified herself and shifted her color so he could see her clearly.

"I said I didn't want company," he said.

She looked perfectly at ease in the trees, hands and feet gripping the tree trunk without trouble. "People have been screaming at you all day, Gabriel. What if someone had attacked you?"

"I can defend myself," he said.

"You should not have to."

* * *

He couldn't sleep. When he closed his eyes, he saw, no, _felt_ pain and agony beyond anything anyone else could imagine. The faces of his crew, the screams, the scathing indictment of their loss on his perceived worthiness to command. It all came tumbling down upon him in those moments when his mind should have been pulled towards rest.

When they restrained and sedated him a second night in a row, Cornwell came to see him first thing in the morning. "I'm worried about you."

He spun the lie as easily as the Earth spun on its axis. "It's the calls. I'm almost done. It'll be better after. You said you'd give me time."

She had said she would spend as much time with him as he needed (which was a lie; she had more important things to be doing in the midst of this war), and that he should give himself time (which was true, not that he ever took such insights to heart), and as usual he had heard what he wanted to hear. Which didn't make his version untrue. Of course he had all the time he needed, and she said so.

"A few more days," he promised.

The nightmares didn't stop. Twice more he woke with people restraining him. He began to notice people talking, whispering in the halls when he walked by. He could guess well enough what they were saying. The captain who let his crew die, who sees them every time he closes his eyes. He's lost his mind. He's unfit. His career's over.

Lorca could see the doctors tapping notes into their padds, talking in low voices as they looked at him, marking things down in his chart. Physical symptoms: the fact that he woke in a sweat, didn't sleep more than three hours at a time, talked and cried out in his sleep, and how his waking hours were marked by haggardness and exhaustion.

He wasn't going to pass the psych eval he knew was coming. He knew the answers to the questions well enough, but at this rate, they wouldn't even administer it. If he didn't pass the psych eval, he wouldn't be given command of another ship.

He would never pass it if he didn't sleep.

They had given him things a few times, to make him sleep, and it had helped, but those details ended up in his chart and did him no favors.

If he didn't get a new command, then what the hell was the point of everyone on the Buran dying.

"Lalana," he groaned as he sat up, exhausted. "I need you to do something for me."

"Anything," she said.

She returned with the drugs fifteen minutes later. He injected himself and relaxed against the bed. "Much better."

"Would it not help if I also edited the shift notes and the other records?"

His eyes shot open and he lifted his head, staring at her as he fought off the growing heaviness of the sedative. "What?"

"I will repurpose some truths for you. Do not worry. They will never catch me. I have never been caught unless I wanted to be."

"Cornflakes," he said as the sedative knocked him into a state of unconsciousness in which nothing made sense, but everything was comfortingly quiet.

* * *

Three days later, Cornwell seemed pleased with his sleeping habits. He could tell from the way she talked to him, the light in her eyes, that she thought he was over the worst of it. There was one lingering concern in the admiral's mind. "Why don't you let them fix your eyes?" Cornwell demanded, trying to understand what would possibly possess him to be dependent on a medical spray when there were bionic solutions.

There was a brief glimpse of fire in him as he answered, "Because these are the eyes that saw them go down. I wouldn't trade them for anything."

That, she knew, was Gabriel Lorca.


	45. Forbidden Fruit

They were going to release him the next day, but there was something he needed to do at Headquarters first. Lorca placed a call. "Admiral Kariuki?" he said. "I need your help." Kariuki listened intently as he laid out his plan.

When Cornwell arrived, he was sitting on the bed in uniform, the windows open and the room full of sunlight. The eye spray sat on the tray next to the bed. He smiled at her with familiar smug confidence and she could scarce believe it. A week ago he had been a wreck. The difference was night and day—in a literal sense, given the sunlight.

"Kat, I have an idea," he said, holding up a padd. Lorca patted the bed beside him. She shot him a questioning look and remained standing with her arms crossed. "Not _that_." Since she wouldn't sit, he stood, and handed her the padd.

She looked down and saw a list of research projects. Her brow furrowed. "What is this?"

The smug smile was replaced by grim determination. "Admiral, we aren't winning this war. The Klingons outnumber us, they outgun us, they are vicious, and they can cloak and appear without warning, which is how they got aboard my ship. If we don't change our course of action in some fundamental way, we may as well start learning Klingon now, assuming any of us survive this conflict."

It was dire, but not untrue. Every day, the Klingons advanced a little further, killed more, threatened more, and Starfleet shrank back and its forces were depleted.

Lorca pointed to the padd in her hand. " _That_ is how we win. _Science_." He delivered the word with all the revelatory gravitas of a true solution to the problem. "What we have that the Klingons don't is the resources of the best minds of a hundred different worlds at our disposal. Vulcan, Andorian, Tellarite, Saurian, Deltan, human. That's how we win."

She scrolled through the project list. Mushroom transporters? Surely that was a joke. Cloak detection research, that looked promising. "What are you proposing exactly?"

"Give me Discovery. I'll get all these projects, put them together, and find us a way to win this war. A real way, admiral. A Starfleet way."

Discovery? It was a science vessel, currently undergoing military refit. Cornwell's eyes widened. It wasn't just a good idea what he was proposing, it was a great one.

With one caveat. "This is a lot, captain. I don't know that you should be going back out there yet." The cavalier attitude that had always served him well was not doing so now. He seemed reckless verging on manic.

Surprise registered on his face. "I'm ready to get back to work, admiral."

"I know you might think that, Gabriel, but given what happened..."

He fixed her with as intense a gaze as she had ever known him to have. "Kat, would I lie to you?" She considered that. He sometimes did by omission, but he was more likely to lie to himself. Which he was probably doing now.

He read her hesitation. Something swept over him. At first, she didn't understand what it was. It seemed somehow alien. Then she realized it was fear, deep and abiding, in a way she had never experienced it from him or anyone else ever before.

"Being in this hospital is killing me, Katrina. If you have to ground me, I understand. It's your prerogative. But we both know Starfleet needs me out there just as much as I need to get out there and make this count. If I don't, then what did my crew die for? They certainly didn't die intending to save me."

Cornwell could not answer that question, because anything she said short of what he was proposing would be a complete lie. They needed him more than ever now.

"It's still a couple weeks before Discovery's ready. If you don't think I'm fit by the time it launches, then I'll abide by your decision."

There was a sound from outside. "Gabriel!" said a translated voice. "I am back!"

"That'll be lunch," said Lorca. Sending Lalana to fetch it gave him time to speak to Cornwell uninterrupted. Not quite enough time, it seemed.

Something grey, the color of the building, rose into view and hopped over the windowsill, landing with a heavy smack on the floor. Lalana shifted back to the usual grey-blue, but part of her did not.

There was an octopus on her head. A live octopus, writhing and wet. It was only a juvenile, but it was still large enough to fill a whole dinner plate. Cornwell recoiled.

"I have brought you your favorite!" Lalana announced, hopping forward. The octopus slapped a tentacle across one of her eyes. Its arm sucked at the smooth, glassy surface.

Cornwell edged towards the wall, freaked out at the sight of the octopus arm on Lalana's eye. Lorca just stared, utterly flabbergasted. "Where did you get that?" he asked.

"From the bay. There are quite a number of them. I'm sure this one will not be missed."

"Oh, no," said Cornwell, shaking her head. "You are putting that right back where you found it."

"But..."

"Fuck's sake, Lalana," groaned Lorca, rubbing his eyes. "Put it back."

"If you won't eat it, I will," said Lalana, and strode over to the corner with her prize. She began to try and remove it from her head. This was much easier said than done.

Cornwell turned to Lorca. "What is she even doing here? This is a Starfleet medical facility." It was supposed to be accessible to Starfleet and immediate family members.

Lorca inhaled, frowned, squinted one eye, and exhaled heavily. "Can't seem to get rid of her," he said at last. "I don't think there's any security she can't slip past." With an octopus on her head, no less. "And she may or may not have some sort of security clearance. I'm not entirely sure on that. She won't say."

"Well if you have security clearance and tell everyone you have security clearance, then you should not have been given security clearance in the first place," Lalana declared. She was trying to pry the octopus arm from her eye with her tail but having little success. The sucker was on quite firmly.

Cornwell sighed and rubbed her eyes. "Right, well, I guess I'll leave you two."

"Admiral!"

"We'll talk tomorrow." Cornwell hastily made her way to the door, glancing once more in horror at the octopus. She took the padd with her, at least.

Lorca stared after Cornwell as she exited. "Thanks a lot," he said loudly once they were alone.

"You asked me to bring you lunch! You did not specify what kind. And you love octopus."

That was true, at least. Lorca made a fricative click with his tongue. "Get over here." He helped her pry the tentacle loose.

"Do you really not want any?"

"Of course I want some. But maybe next time you go get it from a market like a normal person, huh?"

"I am not a normal person. But be glad for that, because a normal person would not put up with you."

He gave a small snort and a twinge of amusement appeared on his face. Tiny, but real. She clicked her tongue twice, slowly, and pinned the octopus down onto the bedspread.

"Could you at least bring some silverware next time? We're not animals."

* * *

It was a surprise when Lalana arrived at Cornwell's office. "Good afternoon, admiral. May I speak to you?"

Cornwell did not hide her shock. "How did you get in here?"

"I do not have clearance," said Lalana, and clicked her tongue.

Cornwell gestured to the chair on the opposite side of her desk. Apparently Lalana actually did have some sort of position in Starfleet. It might merit investigation as to what that was, assuming Cornwell could find the time to look into it. "Is everything all right?"

Lalana hopped up onto the chair as easily as she would have climbed a tree. Many years among humans had turned this once awkward action into something comfortingly familiar. "It is as it is," she said cryptically.

"Is this about Gabriel?" Cornwell had already expended the limited workday hours she could spare to deal with all things Lorca. There was entire fleet of people in need of leadership and it felt like she was being pulled in two directions trying to look out for Lorca and manage everything else in the universe right now.

Lalana's giant green eyes were as intense as ever. "Do you remember that day at the cemetery?"

Cornwell froze. "You saw me."

"Of course I saw you!" said Lalana. "You were standing behind the tree. Humans really do not understand what it is that lului eyes can see, do they. We see a great deal, admiral. More than you could possibly imagine. Phlox imagined it, when he studied the Suliban Cabal corpse. I read his research notes. Perhaps you are aware that they were given our eyes? Though, I did not come here to talk about my eyes."

"Then...?" prompted Cornwell.

"I know that you love him. There is no doubt in my mind as to his love for you. He would tell you if only he could. Since he cannot, I am telling you for him."

Cornwell could not speak. She could barely move. She had a thousand questions and none of them managed to escape into the world.

"But this man who is on Earth right now, he is not our Gabriel. He is a man who needs a purpose. You can give him that. And I know that is a great ask, but I believe good will come of it. He belongs in the stars, Captain Lorca. And I will look after him and let you know if there is anything of concern about the man you love. I am, after all, the third research project on his list."

* * *

In the end, Cornwell folded, as she always did, and that was why he asked her. Because he knew she would. Lorca stood in the plaza between the buildings that made up Starfleet Headquarters and looked at the complex with satisfaction. Discovery was his.

Which was good, because he didn't actually have anywhere else to go. He had no residence on Earth, no life outside of this mission, and only one goal.

Standing off to the side, Lalana watched him carefully, gently tapping her fingers together. This was a risk, all of it, but risks were what Captain Lorca excelled at, and she had full faith in him.


	46. Double Blind

A/N: It seemed only right to start a fresh bag of fortune cookies for the Discovery at this point. All fortunes presented here are 100% unedited draws from the new cookie bag. Lorca's was the first draw, to boot. You can't script this stuff.

Welcome to the USS Discovery.

Additionally, if you have questions about how the events of this fanfic relate to the reveal in the Discovery episode VAULTING AMBITION, please visit my tumblr, writesandramblings.

* * *

As Discovery underwent final modifications for its new mission, Captain Lorca gathered his crew.

Military know-how was only half of the equation. The other half was the science. Lorca provided the tactical expertise that would keep Discovery an active participant in the ongoing war efforts, but the science expertise would come from his new first officer. They met in one of the secluded little Starfleet meeting rooms in Headquarters. It was almost identical to the room Lorca had met Wainwright and Kariuki in some years back. Tastefully unremarkable.

The lights were already dim when Saru entered. Lorca was leaning against a side wall out of the direct light from the hallway, his arms crossed, his face impassive. "Mr. Saru," said Lorca in greeting.

The Kelpien was so tall he seemed almost to scrape the ceiling of the room. Despite his height, his slender build seemed to indicate Lorca could probably take him in a fight. There was no great physical strength there beyond the capacity for running very quickly on Saru's almost impossibly long legs.

"Captain," said Saru, with a note of uncertainty. It was hard to tell what Saru was uncertain about. The new captain? The new ship? The new position? The mission? The war? The dimness in the room? Probably all of it. Kelpiens were a prey species in a much realer sense than lului, and everything about them expressed trepidation in a universe filled with predators.

"You understand this mission?" asked Lorca. He was eager to get a better read on Saru. Despite Cornwell's recommendation, he still had his doubts.

"Yes, captain. I believe I do."

"And your thoughts on it?"

Saru hesitated. Lorca had a feeling he was going to see a lot of hesitation from his first officer if he didn't take a preemptive stand against it.

"Don't question yourself, commander, give me your unvarnished opinion."

The Kelpien's hands were touching in front of him, vaguely reminiscent of the way Lalana sometimes knocked her fingers together. "I think it is... inspired, sir. You are right in your assessment that science is the way to win this."

It was a basic summation of the mission prospectus. Lorca challenged Saru, "That sounds like you're telling me what I want to hear. Not a complaint, Saru, but if we're going to make a go of this, then I need to know you possess a requisite degree of certitude."

The Kelpien straightened slightly. "Yes, captain," he said, this time with some real determination and backbone.

Lorca smiled lopsidedly in approval. "Now that's what I like to hear. Welcome to Discovery." He offered Saru a handshake. The Kelpien found his new captain's grip firm but not overbearing, providing a comforting confidence that stifled the emergence of Saru's threat ganglia. Lorca offered Saru a padd. "Now here's the list of projects we have slated. I'd like you to get up to speed on all of them and report back to me with any thoughts or concerns. I'll expect a full briefing in the morning, ten hundred hours. Until then, you're dismissed."

Saru took the padd with a nod but did not leave. "Captain..."

So Saru did have a backbone, or at least a pressing question he needed to see resolved. "Yes?"

"I believe you passed on me as a candidate for a position once before. May I ask what changed your mind?" Saru was too polite and self-aware to accidentally name-drop the Buran into the conversation.

Lorca was momentarily reminded of Billingsley's words. A slightly different history of events and Saru might have been on the Buran. "Because you more than anyone know what's at stake here, Saru. What happened to the Shenzhou, what happened to..." He paused a respectful moment, tilting his head and swallowing, but otherwise keeping his expression hard. "...My ship, can't be allowed to happen again. At any cost."

Saru bowed his head low in somber recognition. "I apologize for asking."

"Don't," said Lorca. "We don't have time for apologies, and there's no need. I'm gonna be counting on you a lot, number one, and as united a front as we show our crew, when it's just us, you speak your mind. Outside these doors, it's my lead. Understood?"

"Yes, captain." Saru bowed his head again. _Our_ crew. He liked the sound of that.

Lorca leaned his hands on the table as Saru exited, smiling softly to himself. His eyes glinted in the darkness. It felt like this voyage was already off to a good start.

He continued barreling through senior crew assignments. Security, of course, was a crucial position. "Commander Landry," Lorca said, scrolling through her file. "You have an excellent service record."

Ellen Landry was a slight but well-proportioned woman with dark hair and eyes who stood at attention with a bearing that dared anyone to doubt her and have their ass handed to them. "Because I'm an excellent officer."

There were a few disciplinary remarks. She could be brutal, she was not popular among her fellows, but there was a vicious edge to her that fit their circumstances well. She was clearly as confident as they came, even smug. She reminded him a little of himself.

"And do you have any problem serving under my command?"

"None whatsoever, sir," she answered without the slightest hesitation. "You did what you had to do."

He appreciated that. Not the sentiment—it went without saying—but the way she said it. The ferocity. "Glad to have you aboard, commander."

There was one suggestion from Starfleet that Lorca immediately vetoed. "You've gotta be kidding me," Lorca said to Cornwell.

Cornwell did not see any issue, of course, because Cornwell had not been privy to the nature of Li's unsanctioned lului experiment. "Dr. Li is Starfleet's leading expert on lului biology."

"Dr. Li is an epidemiologist. We don't need an epidemiologist to study the mechanics of Lalana's natural cloak. We need someone else entirely. We need her."

Cornwell looked at the personnel file Lorca was indicating and blinked several times. It was an unconventional choice, to be sure. "Are you serious?"

"Dead serious. She has all the expertise we need. In fact, I'd say there's no one more suited."

Cornwell shook her head in disbelief both at Lorca's idea of a suitable candidate and the accidental pun of "dead serious" given the candidate's history, but her face clearly said she was resigned to the fact Lorca was going to get the crew he wanted. Especially where the lului experiment was concerned. "It's going to take some doing," she finally said.

"Then let's do it!"

"Give me a few days. And I'm not making any promises." This was going to be a tough sell to all parties concerned.

Positions filled left and right. The majority did not require interviews, they were simply signed-off on via lists of eligible ensigns and cadets. It was going to be a young crew. That was fine.

To his surprise, when he left Starfleet Headquarters in the evening, one of the selected cadets was waiting and ambushed him on his way back to the hotel he was staying in.

"Captain Lorca!" She was slightly soft-looking, with frizzy red hair pulled back into a bun and a uniform snugly displaying the considerable volume of her chest. He jumped in surprise when she came running at him from the side as he exited the building, then stared in continued shock as words came spilling out of her mouth: "I just wanted to come and tell you in person that I am so happy you've accepted me as a member of the crew! I'm really looking forward to getting out there. Is it true what they say at the Academy? Did you really stink bomb Professor Rokodo's midterm?"

Lorca blinked, shook his head slightly, and stood with his mouth open. The disbelief was palpable.

Tilly looked at him, bright-eyed and completely undeterred by his lack of response. "Oh, right, I'm sorry, you don't know me from Adam, do you! I'm Cadet Sylvia Tilly. I've been assigned to engineering on Discovery!" She stuck out her hand.

Lorca blinked a few more times. This felt like some sort of prank. He shook his head as if to clear it and started walking away.

Tilly watched him go, crestfallen. "I'm such an idiot," she said softly to herself, balling her hands and scrunching up her shoulders and face. She shook her head several times.

"Cadet!"

She gasped slightly as she opened her eyes and looked up. Lorca had stopped several paces away and was looking at her.

"I'll see you on Discovery," was all he said, and continued on his way. Tilly's heart skipped a beat. _Discovery_. The name alone filled her with excitement.

By the following afternoon, everything was set to go, but not all of his crew were on Earth. Some were still en route or would need to be picked up along with their science projects. For that, he needed the actual ship.

* * *

Seeing Discovery was different than seeing the Buran. For one, this was not the promised ship he had been waiting his whole career for, but a ship that had been requisitioned out of carefully-considered necessity. It did not have the Buran's fully military design or armaments, and while it was a gorgeous ship with a very striking design and configuration—and all its technological advancements were a real thrill to have at his disposal—it felt like a means to an end and not the ultimate culmination of years of hard work.

Still, it was his, and that was something. He had gone from a modest warship to no ship to one of the most advanced science vessels Starfleet had to offer. It was not a journey he would have chosen if there had been any other alternative, but at least he had a ship again. The mere thought of being stranded on Earth was enough to send a chill down his spine.

Everything on Discovery had been perfected to his specifications. His rooms were set to dimmer lighting. He had his usual standing desk in his ready room. He oversaw the installation of implements of war into his personal study that ranged from primitive to advanced, basic to ornate, and from the intimate closeness of poison to the effective distance of a sniper rifle. All them were united by one fact: they were deadly. Anything that might give him an edge or an idea was going to be at his disposal when he needed it.

He would have liked to have one of those featherlight spears used by Serot in his new collection, but had no idea where the Shkef came from. Instead he settled for a position of prominence for the Gorn skeleton. The nick on the bones where the spear had gone in was there, if you knew where to look. A cut of molecular precision from a blade that probably had no equal. The secrets of its manufacture would not have done much good in a space battle, but Lorca wished he could have known them all the same.

Maybe he could. The lului might not be responding to Starfleet's attempts to contact them, but they were close to the Klingon border. If they wanted the continued protection of the Federation from any and all future threats, maybe it was time they earned that. Serot would still be there with any luck.

The most important thing, though, was also the smallest. On the desk in his ready room sat a bowl of fortune cookies. He took the first one his eyes set upon and cracked it open. A new fortune for a new ship.

It read, "You have a kind and generous heart." It seemed the universe was laughing at him.

The comms beeped. "Go," he said.

"Captain, you asked to be alerted when Dr. Mischkelovitz arrived."

"Great. Send her in."

When she arrived a few minutes later, she was not alone. There were two men with her. One of them Lorca recognized from the trial coverage.

Out of all the injustices born at the Battle of the Binaries, none had elicited more scorn that the story of mutineer Michael Burnham. Dr. Mischkelovitz had come a distant second. She had been aboard the USS Edison with her husband, Dr. Milosz Mischkelovitz, an experimental physicist and engineer. When the ship took fatal damage, she and her husband were trapped in a disabled section of the Edison and her husband gravely wounded. Her decision to keep him alive by any means necessary resulted in what some regarded as the greatest abomination of modern medical science. If the more sensationalized reports were to be believed, she had reduced her husband to the status of a screaming severed head. (These reports were largely exaggerated.)

Dr. Mischkelovitz's trial had drawn on far longer than the tribunal of Michael Burnham. This had given the public a chance to draw its own conclusions and scrutinize her actions, unfavorably comparing her to the fictitious Dr. Frankenstein. Against seemingly impossible odds, she had been acquitted—in the eyes of the law, not where the court of public opinion was concerned.

Mischkelovitz was subsequently relegated to the unenviable position of gruesome historical footnote in a war full of gruesome footnotes. Lorca himself was such a footnote: the captain who survived the destruction of his command. So were Jack Benford and the crew of the Auckland.

It made Mischkelovitz the perfect sort of candidate for Discovery, but it did not explain why there were two more people in his ready room than Lorca expected.

Dr. Mischkelovitz herself was not very remarkable. She had chin-length brown hair and wore medical white. Her eyes were blue and one of her pupils was markedly larger than the other.

The man on her left had short brown-black hair, blue eyes, and stood only a few inches taller than her, which was a kind way of saying he was short. His face and hands were covered in faint, splotchy freckles and his uniform was the black-on-blue of internal security, Starfleet's version of military police combined with internal affairs. They were not a popular or commonly-encountered division. They tended to appear only when there was a significant disciplinary problem and operated with an alternate but equivalent command structure to Starfleet proper. He had the same pips as Lorca, which meant he was a colonel and equal in rank to a captain, but so long as the man was on Lorca's ship, there was no mistaking who was in charge. A captain's authority on his own ship was superior to anyone else of equivalent rank.

The man on Mischkelovitz's right was bioethicist John Groves, who had defended her in the legal proceedings. He was tall and broad-shouldered, but otherwise thin, with brown hair and eyes. His face had a look of persistent weariness. They had given him an ops uniform without any rank, marking him out as an unenlisted specialist. Why they had done this was a mystery. Groves had no obvious expertise that was of value to Discovery or even pertinent to its mission. He might even be a problem given his specialty.

"Captain," said Groves, immediately stretching his hand out. "I'm John Groves."

"Your reputation precedes you," said Lorca, returning the handshake.

Groves waved his hand at the other two. "Dr. Emellia Mischkelovitz, Colonel O'Malley." Mischkelovitz seemed to shrink away slightly in fear as she looked up at Lorca from across the table. The major merely blinked. It would seem Groves spoke for them all.

"I know why the doctor's here. To what do I owe the pleasure of you and the colonel?" Nothing on Lorca's face indicated he found this to be a pleasure.

"Condition of Mischka's services," said Groves.

"Personal security," said O'Malley, which was an entirely strange thing for someone of his rank and uniform to say.

"Unfortunately, gentlemen, I don't think we have need of any legal scholars, and Discovery has more than enough security, so, this is the end of the line."

"Right," said O'Malley, unbothered. He had an accent that came out as he spoke. It wasn't British, but seemed to be derived from that region in some way. "I'm part of the security protocols you requested for Dr. Mischkelovitz's 'mystery experiment.' I've got two men under me for overlapping twelve-hour shifts, which is as close as you're going to get to what you wanted, and means I'm part of your security operations, even if I don't exactly answer to you, captain."

Lorca immediately pegged O'Malley as a massive pain in the neck. "On my ship, you answer to me just as much as anyone else, colonel," assured Lorca. "Or else you get off right here. Is that clear?"

"Yes, sir," said O'Malley. It sounded slightly too jaunty. Lorca looked forward to putting O'Malley in his place the first chance he got.

"And you, Mr. Groves?" prompted Lorca. "There are no free rides on Discovery, and it's fair to say, where we're going, the law isn't a pressing concern. Have you been in a fight before?"

"I'll stay out of your way, captain, but I'm not going anywhere. If it helps, consider me Mischka's assistant. But if I go, so does she. Those are the terms."

Lorca took a fortune cookie from the bowl. The only one who had yet to say anything was Mischkelovitz herself. "Well, doctor, it seems you have yourself an entourage." He pushed the bowl towards the trio and indicated they should each take one. "Do they always speak for you?" He ate his cookie without comment on the fortune, which was the almost painfully pathetic, "You will have a chance to shine this week."

Mischkelovitz shifted and looked at Lorca wide-eyed. She had never been seen to speak in the trial coverage, but she had to possess the ability, because she was the only one of them with a proper Starfleet commission. She was clearly using her lawyer as some sort of a shield. "No," she said, as Groves took three cookies and distributed one to her and one to O'Malley. Mischkelovitz immediately cracked hers open and started to eat it.

O'Malley opened his and read it out. "Strive for the best." He seemed to find Lorca's affectation amusing. "Yours?" he asked Mischkelovitz. She handed it to O'Malley to read. "You have every reason to be confident."

Mischkelovitz turned and looked at Groves, who was staring at the cookie in his hand like it was something alien. She then began to speak in a language the universal translator did not know. "Kesse ba fortune cookie se prohna ba ni?"

Groves shot her a glance. "Je se proh. Es benna fortune cookie se paal?"

"Ne pras ka," she responded, and Groves handed her his cookie.

Noting the look of mild surprise and confusion on Lorca's face, O'Malley said, "You get used to it."

"What language was that?" asked Lorca.

Groves looked at Lorca darkly and said, "It wasn't."

"I think you'll find that if you intend to stay on this ship, you need to get in the habit of answering my questions, Mr. Groves. Especially when we're in deep space and the only way off is an airlock. Think about that before you answer me again." Lorca smiled in a way that made clear this was a joke, but only barely. Groves, to his credit, began to think very hard.

Mischkelovitz opened the second cookie. She stared at the fortune inside intensely as her teeth crunched down on the cookie. Her brow furrowed and her lips pursed.

"Well don't keep us in suspense, doctor," said Lorca.

Mischkelovitz did not answer immediately, and when she did, her answer was, "No." She put one of the two cookie halves in her mouth, closed the fortune up in her hand, and pressed her hand against her chest.

"I can make that an order," said Lorca, again only half-joking.

"It's just a piece of paper," said Groves.

Mischkelovitz bit her lip, looked up in defiance at Lorca, and said, "It's mine."

"Actually it's mine," said Groves, a note of annoyance creeping in.

"You gave it to me," said Mischkelovitz to Groves, "and that makes it mine." Finally, proof she was capable of a complete sentence in English.

Lorca took a deep breath. He'd had enough of this charade and was beginning to wonder if Cornwell had been right about this being a bad idea. "Right. You two gentlemen out, I'd like to have a word with the doctor alone. And that's an order." O'Malley turned to comply but Groves did not move until Lorca gave an entirely firm, "Out!"

Mischkelovitz grabbed at O'Malley's sleeve. O'Malley seemed unperturbed by this display of familiarity and said, "He's a Starfleet captain, you'll be fine." Then he held up the first of Mischkelovitz's fortunes. "Remember, confidence."

Groves looked displeased at this exchange between the other two and exited without further complaint. O'Malley gave Lorca one final, appraising look as he withdrew.

The door closed. They were alone. Mischkelovitz was looking at the floor. Lorca said, "Do you—"

"May I—" she said at the exact same time.

They both stopped. Mischkelovitz seemed to shrink even further. "Go ahead," said Lorca, but she shook her head violently, hair flapping against her cheeks. "Do you have a problem being on my ship?"

"No, sir," she said in a voice so small it would have suited a music box.

Lorca stretched out his hand to her, palm up. "I'll take that fortune now. It was my cookie first, so if you wouldn't mind, doctor. I'd say I'm entitled."

Her hand shook slightly, but she looked up at Lorca and saw he wasn't angry. He was calm and curious and almost smiling. She tentatively approached the desk, opened her fist slightly, and tilted the paper out onto his palm.

Lorca wasn't sure what he expected the cookie to say, but it certainly wasn't what it did. "That's a very rare fortune," he said, and handed it back to her. "Your secret is safe with me."

"May I have another cookie?"

This was as effective an inducement as the fortune cookies had ever been. "Take as many as you like."

She took four, which was as many as she could hold. Lorca sniffed quietly in amusement. "So, doctor. I need to know now, right now, if you're up to the assignment of Discovery, because there's only one question that matters on this ship. Can you do the work?"

She blinked rapidly. "What exactly is the work?"

"Very good question," he smiled at her encouragingly. It was going to be kid gloves with this one. "You're going to be studying a biological cloak, to see if we can't devise a way to break through the Klingon cloak."

The change was immediate. Her whole face lit up. "A biological cloak? A naturally-occurring cloaking system? How does it work? Is it a phasic shield? Is it a macro- or micro-generated effect? Is it—wait, is it your alien?"

A smile crept onto Lorca's face. "Now what would possibly make you think that?"

"Because there were no scans in the lului medical report. Only optical pictures of cells. We read all the reports on new alien—" She stopped herself. All the light and excitement vanished.

It was obvious to Lorca what the issue was. _We_ , and the use of "read" in the present tense. Mischkelovitz began to quietly put the cookies into the pockets of her uniform. They did not fit particularly well.

"Doctor, do you know why I picked you for Discovery?"

She kept her attention focused on the cookie and pocket problem, but said, "I'm a biomedical engineer and I know physics. I have interdisciplinary expertise uniquely suited."

"That may be true, but that's not why I picked you. I could've taken three other scientists and gotten the same coverage of expertise. Maybe a little more. The reason I picked you, Dr. Mischkelovitz, is that you loved your husband very much, and you would do anything for someone you loved. Starfleet needs people like that."

He was worried she might cry, but she didn't. A smile spread over her face. "Yes, Captain."

It was a relief. They seemed to have reached an understanding about the key issue in play. Which left one other important question unanswered: "Level with me. Do you really need Groves on this ship?"

"Yes. He goes with me. But he may surprise you. He can be useful in unexpected ways. He knows how to puttle a shilot. Puttle a—no. Shuttle a pilot. No. Puttle—puttle—" It was like she had gotten stuck.

"Pilot a shuttle?" said Lorca.

Mischkelovitz was relieved. "Yes. Yes, he knows how to pilot a shuttle, and a lot of other things."

"Alright then, doctor. You can have your assistant." Until such a time as Lorca could find a decent excuse to get rid of the man.

"Thank you, captain. And, please, call me Mischka."

When she left, Lorca glanced at the bowl of cookies, now almost empty.

* * *

There was one more surprise in store. When Lorca got the personnel files for Groves, O'Malley, and O'Malley's two subordinates, there was a familiar name on the list. Lorca immediately summoned him.

"Larsson!"

The Swede was as big as ever, but greying along the temples and the hair on his hands. "Captain," said Larsson, and it was good to hear the word spoken by someone familiar who meant it.

"What are you doing here?" said Lorca, amazed. "I thought you resigned your commission!"

Larsson shifted his head back and forth with a hum and a frown. "War broke out. I came back."

The look on Lorca's face was purely joy. He clapped Larsson on the arm. "It's good to see you." He glanced at the pips. "Still a lieutenant?"

"Yes, well apparently they don't take kindly to people who resign their commission, even if you do come back when you are needed."

"Well, you're the one who wanted to write a book," said Lorca with a chuckle.

Lorca suddenly realized that book had saved Larsson's life. Had it not been for the book, Larsson would have been a security chief on the Buran and been destroyed along with the rest of its crew. Lorca's face went slack.

Larsson watched this shift in expression with morbid fascination. "Aren't you gonna offer me a cookie?"

* * *

They had everyone and everything from Earth they needed. It was time to get underway. "Go," said Lorca, and the stars turned to streaks.

Almost immediately, Richter, the communications officer, said, "Sir, you're being requested in Lab 26."

Lorca made a face. He didn't ask by whom, because when it came to Lab 26, that was potentially a dangerous and complicated question. There were only eight people who knew what experiment was going on in Lab 26. They were Cornwell, Lorca, Saru, Mischkelovitz, O'Malley, Larsson, O'Malley's subordinate Allan, and probably John Groves. Nine, if you counted the experiment's test subject.

It was going to be a few hours until their first stop, so Lorca made his way down to the lab. O'Malley and Allan were standing guard outside. Lorca passed them without a word.

Dr. Mischkelovitz had settled in just fine and was busy running some analysis on the computer. "She's through there," said Mischkelovitz.

Lab 26 had been divided into three areas. The outermost chamber was a small security buffer zone so the door to the hall never opened directly into the lab itself and revealed any secrets to anyone passing by. The second area was the workspace. It was a mixture of medical and engineering equipment and was for Mischkelovitz's sole use.

The third section was personal quarters. The door had the same controls as any other personal quarters on the ship, and Lorca had to press the chime before it let him in.

The room was warm and reddish in color, the lights dimmer than the lab. Lalana was sitting on a couch in the middle of the room. There were several small hammocks and also a table with two chairs.

"This had better be important," said Lorca, thinking Lalana looked like she was relaxing comfortably and not in any actual distress.

"I remember what you said." He had made it completely clear that things were going to be very strictly delineated aboard Discovery. He needed to focus on what he was doing, and the less he thought about her, the better. That meant no social calls. "It is important. It is also trivial, I know, but this is the right time for it, and I promise not to bother you with anything so trivial again. I will restrict all future communications to emergencies."

She rose from the couch and approached him. Her tail flicked over to a nearby hammock and when she held her tail out to him, there was a small piece of paper sticking out from it, held upright by the tendrils of her fur.

"It took me many tries to find this one. But I believe it is important to you, and you should have it."

He took the fortune. It was entirely familiar, because it was the fortune that had accompanied him most of his life until the destruction of the Buran. The original had been destroyed but the sentiment was as true as ever.

 _You make your own fortune._


	47. Mushroom Hunting

There was one experiment so important, Lorca was going to have to share it, but that was a small price to pay for the mycelial spore drive. As he energized in the middle of the orbital lab, he was greeted by a pair of scientists who expressed a mixture of excitement and confusion as to what he was doing there.

"Captain Lorca, it's, uh..." The square-jawed, blonde engineer extended his hand in greeting, even if he wasn't quite sure why. His name was Stamets, and the darker-haired man beside him was his research partner, Straal. Lorca shook his hand and enjoyed the look of confusion.

As confused as Stamets was, Straal was exuberant, shaking Lorca's hand with gusto. "We're glad you're here, captain."

"I understand you have a drive for me."

The reaction was immediate. "Ah, no," said Stamets pointedly, "what we have is an in-development system that is months away from being ready for practical use, maybe even years." He had an emphatic way of speaking that make everything he said sound like a condemnation of the people around him.

"Weeks," said Straal, who apparently had more confidence in their project. "Five weeks."

"What my colleague means is, in five weeks, we might be ready to run some tests on a prototype system," said Stamets. "We're not ready, captain."

If this statement bothered Lorca, he made no sign of it. "Walk me through it, lieutenant. How's it work?" The best way to butter up any scientist was by letting him show off his research to an interested audience.

It was true. Stamets couldn't resist and immediately launched into an explanation of the mycelial network he and Straal had discovered, the revelation that there was no difference between physics and biology at the quantum level, and the spores' relation to the building blocks of the universe. Straal interjected various notes as Stamets spoke, but it was clear the passion for the project lay mostly with Stamets. "The mycelial plane extends to all corners of the universe, and on it we can travel in an instant, anywhere! At least, that's the theory."

"And what's this?" Lorca put his hand on a large, clear chamber.

"This," said Stamets, practically dancing at this point, "is our test chamber. It's sort of like a proto-transporter."

Lorca smiled right back, as pleasant as a holiday parade. "This system doesn't need any sensors as I understand it? No need to detect and compute beforehand what it's transporting?"

"Well, no, not the way most transporters do. It moves everything within in the spore field, and it's entirely self-sustaining in that sense. It doesn't need to think the way you or I or a computer would, it just _does_."

Lorca put his hand on the chamber. It was certainly big enough. "And it's operational? For living matter?"

Stamets began to not like where this was going. "I mean, we've moved a few rats..." He had done a lot more than that, actually, but not in any sanctioned tests.

"I'd like a demonstration."

"I'm sorry?"

"Let's say I had something alive that couldn't be transported conventionally, your system could handle it?"

Stamets frowned and looked at the chamber. "Probably?"

"Definitely," said Straal, grinning. After languishing as a laughingstock for so many years, he was ready for Starfleet's recognition to match his own personal ambitions.

Lorca opened his communicator. "Shuttle docked?" Larsson confirmed it was. "Clear the halls and bring her over."

Lalana entered, escorted by Larsson and Allan. Straal's eyebrows shot up and Stamets gaped.

"Hello!" Lalana said to Stamets and Straal, then turned to Lorca. "This is the system? With this I can be transported?"

"That's the theory. Ready to put it into practice?" said Lorca.

"Absolutely, captain."

"Hold on here," said Stamets, alarmed. "What is this?"

Lalana was a who, not a what, but Lorca let it slide and jovially said, "You mean you've never heard of Lorca's alien?" Stamets hadn't, but that was entirely a result of the rather narrow focus of his general existence. If it wasn't a fungus, chances were he took no note of it.

"If your system can transport me, it will be the first time I have ever been teleported! I have always been so jealous of the fact everyone else can do this. I am very looking forward to it."

There was a heavy current of reluctance in Stamets, but also excitement at the chance to prove his discovery was better than the conventional methods. "I mean..."

Straal pulled Stamets aside. They conferred together for a minute, voices rising and falling but words indistinct. Lorca leaned against the test chamber and waited. Straal began to get very insistent. Stamets narrowed his eyes and looked at Lorca and Lalana in clear judgment.

"We have to," Straal said. "This is what we've been waiting for!"

Stamets sighed. He'd been convinced. "Fine. But we're only running it as a preview test. No actual transportation."

Lalana's tail lowered in disappointment.

"Explain?" prompted Lorca, who wanted a real, full demonstration.

"We put you in the chamber, and you don't actually go anywhere, the places come to you. You sort of _see_ them." Stamets spoke with his hands, emphasizing the sight aspect.

"It'll confirm network compatibility," assured Straal. "Seeing places is the first step towards going to them." What he did not mention was that the "going" step was the part they were still having trouble with.

"In you go, then," said Lorca, smacking his hand twice on the chamber. Straal opened it and Lalana hopped inside.

Stamets narrated his demonstration. He held up a small containment module of glowing blue particles. "These are the spores." He slotted the module into a space designed for it on the control console. "We release the spores into the chamber, and then activate them and control the destination from this interface here. Intended destination, because we're not going anywhere yet." Stamets fixed Straal with a mildly annoyed glare. "The connection lasts less than a minute, and it's only a sort of partial picture of light of where it's targeted. But it's as easy as pressing a button."

Lorca watched carefully as Stamets brought up the navigational interface. It was preprogrammed with various notable planets. "May I?" asked Lorca.

"Maybe you should let us do it," said Stamets. "Since this is our system."

"I'm more than capable of pressing a button, Mr. Stamets. Just say when."

Stamets gave one last look of appraisal at Lorca, realized he was not going to win this argument, and twisted the handle on the spore containment module to release them into the test chamber. "When."

Lalana was surrounded by a cloud of glowing blue spores. Lorca pressed the first planetary coordinates on the list.

What Lalana saw, Lorca could not tell. Her head twisted back and forth. "This is Earth, I think." It was according to the label. Lorca tapped another coordinate set. Vulcan. Another world Lalana had been to and correctly identified, her voice seeming to rise in excitement. Lorca tapped a third. "More!" Then a fourth. Lalana shifted colors, turning a dappled jungle green. Lorca tapped a fifth coordinate set. She shifted again, to a sandy yellow. The colors of the worlds she was seeing. "Again!"

The spores were beginning to disappear. Lorca had a sudden, mad thought and typed in a system name. Stamets was taken aback. "What are you—"

Lalana screamed, " _Hayliel!_ " She shifted back to grey-blue and reached for something that was not there. "Hayliel! I see you! I see the stars and you are with me! Hayliel!" But the spores were fading and with them went the stars and the view.

Stamets looked at the computer console. He did not recognize the system name. _Horaiz?_

Lalana turned green and sank to the bottom of the test chamber, balling up and burying her head against the chamber floor.

Lorca turned to Stamets, wide-eyed with shock. "Did you break my alien!?"

Stamets' mouth fell open. "Me? You wanted to run this test! I didn't even want to do this!" Beside Stamets, Straal looked seriously concerned that their chance to impress Starfleet had just been ruined.

Not that there was any reason for concern, as Lorca well knew. He wanted to see Stamets squirm and had succeeded brilliantly in this aim. Lalana shuddered and rose to her feet, shifting back to grey-blue. "I am uninjured. For a moment, I was... I was surrounded by stars." She turned away and pressed her head against the chamber's back wall.

Larsson strode over to the chamber, wrenched it open, and announced, "I'm taking her back to Discovery now." Lorca let Larsson and Allan leave without comment.

Once they were gone, Lorca turned to Stamets and said, "All right. Now, can you install this system on an entire ship as promised?"

Stamets rolled his eyes and shrugged faintly. "I mean, theoretically."

"Great, let's get it done."

Stamets' mouth fell open and he fixed Lorca with a look that equaled the level of expressive disdain Lorca usually displayed himself. "I'm sorry?"

"Congratulations, Mr. Stamets. Your project is now a part of Discovery. Time to pack up." Lorca contacted Discovery with his communicator and a team of technicians beamed in. Lorca signaled for them to begin taking everything away. "You'll have all the help you need to get this system installed by the end of the week."

"I—It's—You can't just charge in here and steal my research from me!" yelled Stamets, incensed.

"Wouldn't dream of it," said Lorca. "You're coming with. And Lieutenant Straal, the Glenn's coming to pick you up in an hour."

* * *

Lorca made it back to Discovery before Lalana did. A communication came in from the orbital station. It was Stamets' husband, Dr. Culber. Doubtless Stamets was still pitching a fit back on the station and had roped his husband in to intervene on his behalf.

"Captain Lorca." Dr. Culber was an even-tempered man, which was good, because someone in that relationship had to be. He had dark, buzzed hair and a scratch of neatly-groomed stubble beard. There was something disarmingly genuine and earnest about his face and demeanor. It made him instantly likeable.

"Dr. Culber."

"Thank you for taking the time. I'm hoping you can explain to me what's going on?"

"Certainly, doctor." Lorca smiled. He could be equally disarming and likable when he chose. "Discovery has come to take Stamets' and Straal's research and put it into practical application. In case you hadn't noticed, there's a war on, and we're losing."

"And you think Paul is going to help win this war for you?" The doubt wasn't in the value of Stamets' research, because Culber loved his brilliant, driven husband too much to have any doubt as to the fact Stamets would get where he wanted to be eventually. The doubt had more to do with the wisdom of taking someone who was as pure a scientist as there was and putting him on a ship in the middle of a war.

"Not only do I think that, I think you're gonna help us, too. So happens there's a vacancy on Discovery for a medical doctor." Lorca finished this with a smile he hoped illustrated perfectly the great allowance he was making for the couple.

"That's flattering," said Culber, working hard to process the enormity of events and speed at which they were unfolding, "but..."

Lorca could see the doctor needed a bit more of a push. "You're Starfleet, Dr. Culber, you know what that means. You don't get to pick your assignments. Just be glad you get to stay together. I know how important it is to be able to be with the person you love."

Culber softened. "Then thank you, captain, but I want to make sure you understand that this is going to be very hard on Paul. He's not taking this well."

Another smile, disarming to a fault. "With you at his side, I'm sure he'll do just fine."

* * *

As Lorca headed down to engineering to check on the status of in the spore drive install, he overheard Dr. Mischkelovitz engaged in what could only be described as some sort of interrogation at the far end of the hallway. He caught sight of her with Saru.

"But that's not how a food chain works. Doesn't something break down the predators when they die into materials for microbial or plant life? And the predators eat you, but then what do you eat? Each other? Or do you eat the predators when they die, and they eat you while you're alive? How does energy get introduced into the system if there's nothing that feeds on energy from your sun or similar? I've seen you eat berries, so doesn't that mean there are plants on your world that your people eat? Do the predators not decompose into plant food? Are there just piles of predator corpses littering the ground after millions of years? If the plants of your planet digest the decomposing bodies of the predators and you eat the plants, then that is a food chain!"

Lorca covered his mouth to keep from laughing. Poor Saru. The Kelpien usually had a faintly terrified expression fixed upon his face, but it seemed more so under the barrage of questions. He decided to rescue his first officer. "Saru! Mischka. Sorry to interrupt, but I need my first officer."

"This conversation isn't over!" Mischkelovitz called out after them.

When they were out of earshot, Saru said, "Thank you, captain."

"We have to look out for each other, which is why I'm saying this from a place of absolute best intentions. Saru, you need to show a little more steel."

"Steel, sir?"

"Grit, backbone. Come on, Saru. You're a first officer now. You don't need me to rescue you from the likes of Mischkelovitz."

The Kelpien hung his head as they strode down the corridor. "I don't know that I have any... 'steel' in me."

"Oh, yes you do," said Lorca. "I can see it. Against every instinct your people have, you joined Starfleet to explore the stars. That's steel right there. You just have to remember that the next time you're dealing with someone who's not giving you the respect you deserve. Got it?"

"Yes, captain," said Saru, straightening. "Thank you. I don't think anyone has ever accused me of having any steel in me before."

"That's 'cause other people aren't as good at seeing things as I am. Even with these unfortunate eyes." He grinned at his own joke. "Now how about you take the lead and handle this mess in engineering?"

"Mess, sir?"

As the doors to engineering opened, they revealed a scene of horrible chaos. People running around, arguing, confused. Consoles and modules and devices laying around, no one quite sure where anything was supposed to go, and Stamets in the middle of it all looking positively apoplectic.

Lorca reached up and patted Saru on the shoulder. "All yours, number one."


	48. Nothing Ventured, Nothing Gained

The USS Glenn, which had the benefit of Straal's eager participation instead of Stamets' incessant demands for systemic perfection, had their drive up and running first. Stamets was very annoyed at Lorca's admonishment over their perceived loss in the race.

"Lieutenant, I need that drive up and running _yesterday_. The fact that the Glenn is online means you've been wasting time."

"Wasting time? Really? Do you want it working, or do you want it working _right?_ " said Stamets scathingly. "Because I refuse to half-ass years of my research to satisfy your precious little—"

Lorca raised his voice to the point it made most of the people in engineering stop what they were doing in alarm. "Lieutenant! I don't think you understand what's at stake here. Every day, every hour, every minute this ship is not active, people die. _Our_ people die. Now can you get this drive online or can't you!"

Either out of some misguided misunderstanding as to the power dynamics at play or some genuine desire to commit personal and professional suicide, Stamets stood his ground and shouted back, "If I get it online and the first test kills us, then what was the point!" He threw up his hands in an exaggerated shrug. He was in the habit of making everything sound like the world was ending. In this case, the glove fit.

Lorca's eyes narrowed. "Henderson!" he barked. An engineer stood at attention from the side of the room.

"Yes, sir!"

Lorca kept his gaze firmly on Stamets as he addressed the other engineer. "Can you get this system up and running by twenty-two hundred?"

"Yes, sir!" Henderson had no idea if it was possible, but he knew better than to argue with the captain.

"Well, then. Unless you want me to drop you off on the nearest rock minus your precious mushrooms, I suggest you make good on that, Stamets. _Do you understand?_ "

"You don't know how any of this works without me!" protested Stamets.

"I believe the words you're looking for are 'yes' and 'captain.'"

It was hard to imagine Stamets' complexion getting any paler, but somehow it did. "Yes, captain."

Lorca stormed out of engineering, biting back the urge to turn around and punch Stamets in the face. He grimaced and almost snarled as he tried to remind himself there were bigger forces at play, and Stamets was something he was going to have to deal with every day for the foreseeable future.

"Captain!"

Lorca whirled and snapped, "What!" with such avarice he startled himself slightly, especially when he saw it was Landry. She seemed taken aback, but not flustered.

"If this is a bad time," she said.

Lorca closed his eyes a moment and pressed his fingers to the bridge of his nose as he breathed in. When he exhaled, he was sufficiently calm. "Commander Landry. What can I do for you?"

"I want to set up a few unannounced combat drills to test the crew's readiness for threats. I'd need you to sign off on them, and with your permission, I'd like at least one of the drills to be a surprise for senior crew. Including you."

It was a bold move for a commander to suggest her captain was in need of a drill—particularly when he came from the same security and tactical background—but it was also wartime, and Lorca appreciated the sentiment enough to smile softly. "How many drills did you have in mind."

"Three this week, five the next."

"I'll let you surprise me twice," said Lorca, smile widening. Landry responded in kind, smirking in pleasure at the chance to give her captain a run for his money.

"Thank you, sir. I'll send you the schedule for the ones you'll know about." She tilted her head slightly. "You know what I find always does the trick after dealing with those eggheads? Hand-to-hand combat."

There was a look in Landry's eyes that was not hard to read, but Lorca knew to tread carefully all the same. "Is that an invitation?"

It was.

* * *

"Oh my god, Hugh, I just, I can't!"

Stamets was standing off in the corner of engineering at the holocomm, totally ignoring the flurry of people scurrying around him in the vain hopes of meeting the captain's deadline. He was taking the minutes out because he had to. He could feel himself overloading.

Culber was, as always, a patient and respectful ear. "It may seem impossible, but if there's anyone who can do impossible," he offered in encouragement. "Break it down into steps and go through them one at a time."

"It's just, he makes me so mad! Coming in here, threatening to take my research away..." Stamets pressed a hand to his face. "Ugh! I want to kill him!" His hand shook in the with frustration.

"No, you don't," said Culber, smiling, because knew Stamets was a gentle person beneath his tense, grating exterior.

"Okay, okay, I don't," admitted Stamets. "But if an accident happened..."

Culber laughed. The sound relaxed Stamets immensely. Just hearing that laugh made it seem like everything was going to be okay. "Why not call Straal and ask him how he got his drive up and running?"

"And suffer the indignity of him lording it over me?" Stamets liked Straal, but occasionally their research partnership could get adversarial. Often they did their best work operating in competition. "Besides, I know how he did it. He cut corners."

"Maybe there are a few corners you can cut, too?"

It was an earnest, sincere suggestion that came from a place of genuine goodwill. Stamets reacted by shuddering and shaking his head. "But if we cut corners and it isn't safe... and if the _captain_ "—it sounded pejorative when Stamets said it—"thinks I'm willing to cut corners now, then down the line... If I give him an inch, he'll take a mile." Stamets sighed and looked momentarily adrift. "I wouldn't forgive myself if something happened to you because of me and my work."

It was impossible not to be flattered. "You know I love you no matter what," said Culber. "Besides, you already happened to me, and I'm glad you did."

A goofy smile spread across Stamets' face as he looked at Culber, cheeks flushing.

"Now get out there and knock 'em dead," said Culber. "Figuratively speaking."

"I'm not promising that," said Stamets with a grin.

As the call ended, Culber sighed. He was quickly wising up to the fact Lorca was less a captain and more a force of nature unleashed upon the crew. What had they gotten themselves into?

* * *

Landry was an entirely satisfying opponent. There was something irresistible about a woman who could hold her own in a sparring match against a man nearly twice her size.

"You're pulling your punches," she said. "Come on."

"If I drop you, you're gonna make me pay in those security drills," guessed Lorca.

Landry bobbed and weaved in readiness. "Price of admission," she challenged. She was an aggressive fighter. She had already landed several solid kicks on his torso and legs that promised to bruise. In return, he'd given her a couple solid torso strikes, several arm hits, and maybe-not-accidentally a small jab on the cheek. He had the weight, the strength, and the reach. Her advantages lay in unrepressed ferocity, stamina, and flexibility.

Her ferocity could also be used against her. He jabbed, she blocked and returned with a kick, but Lorca was ready. He executed a quick hooking move that caught her leg and disrupted her balance, taking advantage of the fact to sweep her down to the mat and pin her to the ground. He was careful to land more beside her than on top of her. The point was to knock her down, not hurt or disable her to the point of ending the exercise.

"Surprise," he said, a devilish grin on his face.

She was close enough to taste the sweat coming off him. Her dark eyes searched his and seemed to promise something of a different nature. His eyebrows rose in daring invitation.

She took the invitation in a slightly different direction. Rolling and twisting, her leg came up and around so that when she bucked, it knocked him backwards onto the mat and she ended up on top of him with his right arm twisted under her control. He released a satisfactorily pained exhalation. "Right back at you," she said.

It was not an easy position for him to get out of. It was possible to overwhelm her position by sheer strength, but to do so would have been an insult to her technique, which was excellent. "You gonna let me up?" he asked, turning his head towards her even though this made his shoulder twist further in pain.

"Do you want me to?"

He bit his lip, grinned, and shook his head no.

"Then I guess not."

That was fine. They didn't need to get up for what came next.

"Ellen," he said afterwards with a chuckle.

"That is my name," Landry remarked. "Is there something funny about it?"

There was. He started to snicker.

She sat up, suddenly concerned, because laughing at her name was not how encounters usually ended in her experience.

"I'm sorry," he said, almost meaning it, "it's just... My wife's name is Eleanor." He started laughing again.

Landry had read his file and there had been no mention of any wife, past or present. "You're married?" she said, shocked. It wasn't that she minded—what happened on starships tended to stay on starships—but she disliked the idea of being misled about their congress.

"No," he said, shaking his head. "Absolutely not. It's a joke. A very bad joke. How about another round?"

* * *

Saru entered Lab 26 with a vague sense of trepidation. Stand up to Dr. Mischekelovitz, that was his goal. Don't let her see him as anything less than the most hardened piece of steel. As the inner door opened he began his speech, which he had carefully prepared: "Dr. Mischkelovitz, it has come—"

She gasped and shrank away from him.

She was sitting at her desk, which was only a few feet from the door, with a framed piece of paper in her hands. She had been crying. She was crying still.

The speech suddenly seemed inappropriate.

"I am sorry," he said immediately. "I will come back." He turned to leave, then realized steel could have many purposes. A weapon wielded to display one's strength was one interpretation, but it could also be a shield to protect others, or a support upon which to build something. A first officer who was steel could be all of these things. He turned back towards her. "Doctor. What is wrong?"

She didn't speak. The whimpers in her throat were almost chirps, tiny and high-pitched. She looked down at the frame in her hands and closed her eyes.

"Would you prefer if I left?" he asked. "I would like to help you, if I can."

The little chirpy whimpers turned into a sustained warbling.

It did not come particularly naturally to him, comforting humans, or really comforting anyone, because like most Kelpiens he had lived much of his life in an innate state of constant self-serving fear evolved to evade predators. Even now, some part of him was screaming that he should run, and Mischkelovitz was clearly no threat to him. She was the furthest thing from a threat imaginable.

He looked at the frame in her hands. It held a drawing of her, but it was unlike any other portrait he had ever seen. It was styled like an engineering schematic. There were straight lines running through it, markings that resembled circuitry and pistons, and circles of perfect technical precision. It was almost as if someone had drawn a diagram of her face designed to be built into something robotic or mechanical.

He knew her history because everyone did, and it seemed a fair guess. "Is that... your husband's?"

Even before the Battle of the Binary Stars, Saru had known the reputation of Milosz Mischkelovitz. He was widely regarded as one of the finest design engineers in Starfleet, and engineering wasn't even his main area of interest. Some of his designs were said to be years in advance of what Starfleet could actually produce. What things they could make were known to be of uniquely elegant design, and carefully planned out in advance of production down to the tiniest detail. Though Saru had never seen Milosz's design work himself, he had heard it was exhibited in art museums on occasion. Seeing this portrait, it was clear why.

"May I see?"

Mischkelovitz's hands shook as she turned towards Saru and lifted the image slightly towards him. He accepted it with great care.

The detail viewed up close was exquisite. Varying line width helped define the exact light and shadows of the portrait. Some of the lines were so thin they were smaller than a human hair. "It's beautiful," said Saru.

"So was he," said Mischkelovitz, folding her hands against her chest. "He was the most beautiful person in the entire universe. I miss him."

Saru gently returned the portrait to her desk. He knew from experience what had helped him through his grief at the loss of so many friends and loved ones at the same battlefield where she had lost her husband. "Would you like to tell me about him?"

Mischkelovitz slowly looked up at him, her eyes wide and hopeful. "Yes!" she said, almost breathless. "Yes!"

He drew up a chair beside her and sat and listened as she told him all about her husband with the sort of detail that can only be shared by someone who has known true love.

* * *

Saru found the captain in his ready room, the lights dim, the stars shining. "Mr. Saru," said Lorca, clearly in an excellent mood. This despite reports he had gotten in a veritable shouting match with Stamets just a few hours earlier. Lorca rubbed his hands together in gleeful anticipation. "I'm ready for your report. How're our projects doing?"

"For the most part, well," said Saru. "And I spoke with Dr. Mischkelovitz. I think, captain, that... I may understand what it means to be steel."

"Told you so," said Lorca with a grin, pleased as much with himself for saying it as he was with Saru for starting to live up to the words. "Now, let's start with that warp field interference project in Lab 12..."

As they stood and discussed their scientific endeavors, Saru thought to himself that true steel meant more than Gabriel Lorca thought it did. It wasn't just about standing up for yourself. Sometimes it was about sitting down for someone else.


	49. Going Nowhere Fast

A/N: Sorry for the delay, I had one of those troublesome scenes where it took six tries to get it to do what I needed it to! I got it working in the end. Now I have five alternate versions of the Lab 26 scene to throw in with the outtakes at the story's end!

* * *

It was a welcome surprise when Lorca ended up giving Stamets an extension until the morning. For the life of him Stamets couldn't figure out why, but at least Lorca seemed happy with the progress they had made in the evening, and after the whole engineering team pulled an all-nighter, they had the spore drive up and ready to go first thing in the morning. They ran the final systems check while Lorca was eating breakfast and prepared the first test protocol while Lorca busied himself with his usual morning exercise in his quarters.

When Lorca arrived in engineering, Stamets was standing proudly at attention with his team. "Captain, our drive is ready."

"Really?" said Lorca, grinning.

"Ready, ready," said Stamets, twice to show he was doubly confident and in a good mood. Maybe slightly delirious from lack of sleep. "And I'd like to do the honors myself, but I know how much you like to push the buttons..." He gestured at the controls.

Lorca snorted. "You should do the honors. It's your work."

"Really?" said Stamets, surprise plastered over his face. This went against his every impression of Lorca. "That's uncommonly generous of you."

"Is it? You want the responsibility of potentially destroying this ship?" It was an especially dark sentiment given the fate of the Buran.

That wiped the smile right from Stamets' face and replaced it with a look of dry, grim resignation. Just when he thought he might be able to like the captain. What an asshole Lorca was.

"Shipwide channel!" barked Lorca, and from the back row, Cadet Sylvia Tilly practically tripped over herself to carry out the order.

"I'll get it!" she went, dashing over to the nearest console. "Shipwide communications, let me see here... Um. No, that's not it. Maybe it's..." She pressed a button. The lights in engineering went out. "Sorry! One second. Um, what did I just press..." She found the control again and the lights came up quickly. Lorca shouted in pained annoyance, his hand over his eyes. "I am so sorry, sir!"

"Tilly!" hissed Stamets.

Lorca exhaled very slowly through clenched teeth as he blinked his eyes rapidly back open. "Cadet. Do you or do you not have a shipwide comm channel?"

"Umm, well... Here! It's here! I found it! And it's... On!" The word "on" went out across the entire ship. Tilly paled.

There were no words, but there was an absolutely withering look in Cadet Tilly's direction from both Lorca and Stamets.

"Discovery, this is your captain," said Lorca sharply. "We're about to test our new engines. All hands, hold tight." He then made a slicing motion with his hand indicating Tilly should cut the comms off. She managed that task without any trouble, at least.

Stamets loaded the spore module into the drive chamber. As the drive came online, a change came over the ship. The lights shifted and dimmed. All nonessential power systems redirected to the drive and its safety systems. The outer portion of the saucer began to rotate, providing the faintest thrum in the air as the spores were distributed throughout the ship. "Drive online. Spore dispersal... optimum. Ready when you are, sir."

"Go," said Lorca.

There was a pulsing sensation and a dampness in the air. Everyone stood, waiting. Stamets looked around at them, wondering why there was no applause. "Guys! That was it!"

It had barely felt like anything. "How far did we go?" asked Lorca, surprised by the smoothness of the ride.

"Nowhere," said Stamets. "We didn't go anywhere. But we jumped! In place." He looked positively giddy at this success. "For a moment, we were in the mycelial network! It works!"

Lorca seemed unimpressed. Everyone did, with the lone exception of Tilly, who was as excited as could be. She shook her fists in the air with a look of utter delight, turned to the engineer next to her, and said without the faintest hint of irony, "We did it!" She received another scathing glare for her trouble.

Stamets was not going to let the lack of enthusiastic response rain on his parade. "All right, everyone, let's reset and ready for the next test!"

The rest of the engineering crew, operating on little sleep and apparently less of whatever substance Culber had given Stamets, shuffled into morose action. (Not that Culber had given Stamets anything more than the rest of them. Stamets was riding a wave of natural endorphins from the fact that, against long odds and his own pensive fatalism, his spore drive had worked. Sadly, no one outside of Stamets and Tilly considered a stationary ship drive an accomplishment.)

"And when will the next test be?" asked Lorca.

"We need to do some data crunching from this test, confirm the spores are germinating at a sustainable rate and harvest more, so... three days?" Stamets looked for a glimmer of acceptance in Lorca's face and found none. "Two?" Still nothing. Stamets began to look worried. "Tomorrow?" It was more a horrified question than an offer.

"Tomorrow it is," said Lorca, and left Stamets to it. It wasn't much of a start, but it was a start all the same, and with the Glenn successfully executing its first set of miniscule distance jumps, Lorca felt confident within the next two days, they'd have Discovery doing the same.

That only left the other nine hundred headaches on this voyage of infinite delights.

From his ready room, the lights comfortably dimmed, Lorca sent a message to Starfleet Command encrypted at the highest security level: "DRIVE TEST SUCCESSFUL." Then he grabbed a pair of fortune cookies and made his way over to Lab 26.

Over the past two weeks, Mischkelovitz had been in a phase of her research she defined as conceptualization. "The first step towards attacking any problem," she said, "is determining the ways in which it can be attacked." This was a sentiment Lorca appreciated, so long as at some point she actually initiated an attack. So far, she had not done so.

It was time to bring down the hammer.

Allan and Larsson were on door duty. Larsson inclined his head just slightly as Lorca entered the security chamber. The outer doors closed and the inner doors opened.

Groves was sitting in the lab, feet up on Mischkelovitz's desk, reading over something on a padd, a cup of hot tea in his hand. "Captain," he said, but didn't get up. Barely glanced up, even.

"I was looking for Dr. Mischkelovitz."

"She's not in yet. Computer, time?"

"Nine-twenty," went the computer.

"Give it an hour and a half," said Groves.

Lorca raised an eyebrow. "Being on a starship is new to you, Mr. Groves, so let me clear something up. Captains don't wait. Computer, locate Dr. Mischkelovitz!"

"Dr. Mischkelovitz is in Lab 26."

Groves looked up, but still appeared disinterested. "She's in one of her hidey-holes. Even I can't tell you which one."

Lorca was torn between being amused by that and very, very unamused. He fixed Groves with a look that absolutely demanded an explanation.

"They're listed as 'storage compartments' on the design specs. If you want, you can reassign the quarters you gave her. She's never gonna use 'em."

"Very generous of her," Lorca said tersely. He wondered what Mischkelovitz did for showering facilities, then realized he was probably staring at the answer to that question.

"I know, right?" said Groves, willfully ignoring Lorca's obvious annoyance. "By the way, captain, love your alien. The whole 'killing is ethical as long as you eat it' thing? Fantastic. Radical recyclers, I'm calling it. I'd keep her away from Saru, though. Can't imagine a Kelpien taking that line very well." Groves chuckled.

"You find that amusing?" said Lorca.

"Well, yeah, I mean, the historical treatment of Kelpiens doesn't jive with the whole 'enjoyment of life' element of lului philosophy, but what it boils down to is, the lului would have no trouble with the continued consumption of Kelpiens so long as they were 'free-range' in their natural habitat." Groves looked positively delighted by this. "And while I'm on the subject, don't tell Mischka your favorite food is octopus. She will not take it well. To her, that's like you eating Saru."

There was only one way Groves could know that particular fact. Lorca glanced at Lalana's door. "I'm surprised. You'd think a bioethicist would be a little more offended at the idea of eating my first officer. "

Groves swatted his hand dismissively. "Common mistake. Being an ethicist doesn't make me an ethical person. I just like asking the questions. I'm what you'd call a moral relativist, captain. Everything depends on circumstance."

The fact Groves was a relativist was potentially useful information. Lorca tucked it away for later and put one of the fortune cookies on Mischkelovitz's desk. "Tell Mischkelovitz I want a status report by twelve hundred hours."

"You got it, captain," replied Groves, returning to his reading.

Lorca rang Lalana's door. Lalana answered it a moment later, bouncing back on her tail and spinning her hands with happiness. "Gabriel!"

"A word?" said Lorca. Lalana waved him in with her tail and went to sit on the couch. Lorca remained standing and crossed his arms. "You've been talking to Groves about me. Don't."

Lalana's hands stopped spinning. "Oh?"

"This isn't a pleasure cruise. I don't want details of my personal life being known by the crew."

"If I cannot talk to you, then I will talk about you, Gabriel."

Lorca fixed her with a look. "That's unacceptable."

Lalana stepped off the couch and stretched up to chest height, grabbing hold of a hammock for support. "Do you want to know what I think is unacceptable? I am living in a room without any stars to look at and I do not see or speak with you for days on end. Have you considered what that is like?"

He exhaled and bit his lip. She had a point. "Apologies," he said. "I've been busy. This is how it is on a starship. I don't have time for social calls. We're in the middle of a war."

"Then give me the end of your day, as you used to. In return for that, I will continue to aid in any way I can on Discovery, and in any other capacity as you require."

It was, considering everything she had done for him and had the potential to do, a very modest request. He still hemmed and hawed over it. "I can't promise you every night."

"At least try, that is all I ask. Is twenty-two ten still convenient?"

He breathed in and out again, this time through his nose. Finally, he said, "Yes."

"Then it is a date. Thank you, captain."

It would probably be for the best. She was an ally he could ill afford to lose. If this was the price of keeping her at his side, then so be it. "There was something else. I've been thinking your people ought to maybe consider that if the Federation falls, so does our protection of Luluan."

"I am going to stop you right there. Gabriel, if you set foot on Luluan, they will take one look at you and kill you. They will eat you, so it will serve a purpose, but they will kill you. They will also not help you. Whatever it is you are imagining, they will refuse."

"Really? With everything that's at stake?" An army of undetectable spies seemed like it might come in handy right about now.

"Please do not let the sacrifice of the Buran have been for nothing by attempting to conscript my people into this war or any other cause. They will not serve you."

"Well what about that box? Maybe they'll tell us what it is."

"If Umale were going to, he would have already. Your best bet is probably to give it to Emellia. She and I might be able to figure it out together. But it would mean sacrificing time from the cloak detection research, which is time we can ill afford to sacrifice, is it not?"

Lorca gave a short, throaty hum. "Maybe it's a cloak detection device."

Lalana clicked her tongue with mirth. Lorca couldn't resist a smile. "I somehow doubt that," she said, "but it would be an amazing coincidence."

"I guess that would mean Umale could see the future," said Lorca.

Lalana clicked again. "Lului eyes see many things, so, who knows? Maybe we can."

Lorca laughed at that. "If only. I brought you something." He offered her the second fortune cookie. She happily took it with her tail and spun her hands. It seemed all was forgiven. He said, "You'd tell me if you could see the future, right?"

"The most I have ever seen is a halo of stars. I saw it on the Triton, and again here on Discovery. For some reason, it always seems to happen near you."

"Must be fate, then," said Lorca, thinking that was the most ridiculous bit of romantic poetry he had ever heard.

"I suppose so." She opened her cookie and read aloud, "'You are surrounded by unlimited opportunities.'"

"And here I was thinking I was surrounded by a halo of stars."

Again, she laughed. "Oh, Gabriel! Yours is not the stars, but the space in-between."

Whatever that meant.

* * *

Mischkelovitz delivered a promising status report. She stood as a hologram in Lorca's ready room. "So, in analyzing the problem, obviously the reason why a lului would make a good subject for cloak detection research is that we are trying to figure out a way to identify things which do not appear to be there. A biological mechanism is going to be completely different than whatever technology the Klingons are using, but! If I can devise a way merely to detect that which is not there, it should potentially be universal. Now, I have delineated fifteen possible approach vectors for this problem, and then each of those vectors has between three and seven variations that might prove efficacious, depending on—"

Lorca cut her off. "Mischka, have you started working on anything?"

"Yes, I've sent in a requisition request for materials and supplies in order to build three devices to begin with. As soon as I have the components, I can start fabrication."

"That's all you had to say."

It was amusing to watch her react to this information. She looked nervously around at everything except him. "Oh. Okay! Um, then. I also solved the holocomm problem."

Lorca shrugged slightly, prompting her to explain. He wasn't aware of any problems with the holocomms.

"So, Lalana doesn't register on the holocomm sensors as a life form independent of her surroundings? What I did was I scanned the surroundings and applied a differential filter. Now it can create a properly mapped image of her because it's just taking what's different from the room scan in the optical range. No more crazy spliced-up dimensions. There are a few limitations. It doesn't do the flip-around thing that makes it so you're always looking at the person and vice versa, and it doesn't, um, do the interaction with objects? Like, you know, chables and tairs—" She froze. "No. No. Chables and—no. Chables—"

"Tables and chairs."

"Yes, yes. Interactive objects. It doesn't do that. She can appear as floating in space if she's on top of something. But! You get a three-dimensional picture. I'd say we're off to a good start."

"Try to keep focused on the cloak, but, thank you, Mischka."

"Oh! That reminds me! I have to thank you. Here." She turned around and picked up something from her desk. The holocomm flipped her position as she did, keeping her facing him. It was the fortune from the cookie he had left that morning. She walked towards the hologram of him on her side and held the paper up so he could read it. It read, _Remember to say "thank you."_ She had interpreted it literally. "Thank you for letting me join Discovery, captain. I didn't think anyone would ever want me around again, but, here we are."

"Here we are," repeated Lorca, smiling at her.

"And thank you for the cookie. Please bring more by any time."

"You got it. One last order of business. You're not using your quarters?"

"No, I prefer to sleep where I work."

"Then I can reassign them?"

"Sure! I don't like having a roommate anyway. If I need a bed, I'll just use John's." That confirmed another detail for Lorca.

"Great. Lorca out." The next comm went to Saru. "Saru. The cadet with the snoring roommate? Give her Mischkelovitz's room assignment."

"And Dr. Mischkelovitz?"

"No assigned quarters."

There was a sudden note of concern in Saru's voice. "Is the doctor leaving Discovery?"

"She sleeps where she works, number one." And now no one would have to be bothered by Cadet Tilly's snoring. Two birds with one stone.


	50. Time Space Stumble

A/N: In the spirit of continuing occasional classic Trek escapades, I give you "Time Space Stumble."

* * *

The tests continued. They achieved distance jumps. First small distances, differences barely visible to the naked eye, but then bigger jumps, bigger distances, measurable not in meters but kilometers. Always, though, they seemed to be trailing the Glenn just a smidgen. If they went fifty kilometers, the Glenn went sixty.

"He refuses to push us past the Glenn," said Lorca. He was standing at the window of his quarters, a hologram of Lalana beside him. The two rooms had been carefully mapped in such a way that Lalana appeared to be standing on the same plane as him, and his bed equaled her couch.

"You really have terrible luck with engineers," she informed him. "Billingsley was a 'piece of work,' Sural had no sense of humor, and now Stamets is... well, it's clear you like him, at least."

"He's a headache!" exclaimed Lorca. "The most frustrating man I've ever met."

"Yes, but how much fun do you have watching him squirm? There is a certain degree of delight in your face."

Lorca exhaled in a long _chhhhh_ through his teeth. "No," he concluded. "I don't like Stamets. I hate him!"

Lalana clicked her tongue. "You only protest this hard when I'm onto the truth."

Lorca started to laugh. "My god, you're ridiculous."

"Yes, but would you have me any other way?"

That made him laugh so genuinely, he felt a little guilty about it. "What about your day."

"Saru came by, to check on Emellia's progress, and then they ended up spending a long time drinking tea. Apparently, Saru's old captain also drank tea."

Lorca had noted as much in a personal log many years back. "That she did," he said, with a degree of somber reverence for the departed captain. Even if Georgiou's grave miscalculation at the Binaries had potentially kicked off this war. "So Saru and Emellia get along?"

"I think she might like him even more than you like Stamets."

"Get it through that thick, blue skull of yours. I don't like Stamets!"

* * *

And yet, as they readied for the latest test of the spore displacement drive, Lorca had to admit Lalana was sort of right. Making Stamets squirm was absolutely delightful. "Stamets!" Lorca shouted, his voice filling the entirety of the bridge. "Where is my spore drive!"

Stamets, for his part, always rose to meet Lorca's level of ire. "We're not ready yet, captain! We need fifteen minutes!"

"Why!"

"Maybe I don't feel like telling you!" This was a sure sign something was going very wrong in engineering.

Lorca balled his hands into fists and took a deep breath, deliberately forcing his anger away. It half-worked. He didn't scream, but he remained firmly angry as he warned, "Don't make me come down there to engineering, lieutenant. When am I getting my drive back?"

" _My_ spore drive up will be up and running in fifteen minutes. Not ten, not five, _fifteen_."

"You have five minutes!" yelled Lorca. "Bridge out!"

Everyone on the bridge was holding their breath. None of them could see Lorca's face, standing as he was at the very front of the bridge by the viewscreen. Lorca clenched his teeth and shook his head as he stared out at the stars. Then he relaxed somewhat. There was a rather nice red-orange nebula visible. Probably Lalana was staring at it right now. He'd had the main viewscreen routed through to her quarters so she could look at the same stars he did.

When Lorca turned away from the viewscreen and faced the bridge crew, he looked perfectly calm and even mildly amused. "It anyone wants a coffee, you've got ten minutes," he advised them, smiling. At the operations console, Lieutenant Owosekun smiled and tried not to laugh. She was awfully cute, but Commander Landry was over at the tactical console on the other side of the bridge, and Landry was not a woman you stepped out on unless you had a death wish. Besides, of the two, Lorca guessed Owosekun was the less experienced in bed. Pretty only went so far.

Lorca paced the bridge, walking past the stations and stretching his legs. He paused and exchanged a quick word with Saru at the science station on a briefing scheduled for later that afternoon. After seven minutes, Stamets reported to the bridge that the spore drive was ready.

"Thank you, lieutenant," said Lorca, sounding perfectly amicable.

"So, are we going to go now?" asked Stamets expectantly.

"Not just yet," said Lorca. He could picture the frustration on Stamets' face.

After a minute, Stamets asked, "Are we waiting for something?"

"You're waiting for my command," said Lorca, in the same vaguely derisive tone that had once flummoxed Sarah Billingsley on the Triton. Poor Stamets, but really, the man brought it on himself. Lorca waited just long enough that he began to get impatient himself, then declared, "Black alert! Lieutenant Stamets, do you have our destination keyed in?"

"As good as it's gonna get," said Stamets, probably rolling his eyes as he said it.

"Yes or no, Stamets."

"Yes!"

"Prepare to jump." The traditional pause. "Go."

Discovery jumped. There was the familiar sensation of clammy humidity on the skin.

Everything went sideways. The ship lurched, sending Lorca sliding across the bridge as the force of an impact overwhelmed the gravity generators. Lieutenant Detmer half-fell out of her chair at the helm. Alarms blared. At the ops panel, Owosekun managed to keep a firm grasp on her console and reported, "All systems stop!"

" _Stamets!_ " bellowed Lorca, climbing back to his feet.

"I don't know what happened!" said Stamets, sounding genuinely panicked. "We jumped, we just..."

Lorca looked at the viewscreen. The red-orange nebula had been replaced by a faintly starry void. "Astrometrics! Where are we?"

"Not where intended, sir. It looks like we've traveled... six light years!"

Even if something had gone wrong, Lorca was impressed. This was more than triple their previous record. It was also farther than the Glenn had gone and meant the ship was potentially approaching viability over long distances. But the best part was they had finally surpassed their rival. Discovery was in the lead.

"All right. Systems check."

The alarms quieted. They ran through the systems one by one. Everything seemed fine, until the lieutenant at the communications panel, Richter, reported: "Sir, I'm not receiving any subspace communications."

"Comms down?"

"They seem to be operating, it's just, no signals, and no response to our communications." Wait..." Richter's brow furrowed. "I am receiving something, but it's... I don't understand. I'm sorry, sir, I don't know how to explain it."

"Sir, I believe I have an answer," said Saru. Lorca turned his attention to his first officer. "We are receiving communications signals, but at a rate so gradual it is almost undetectable."

A faulty communications relay? Lorca crossed over to Saru's station to see for himself.

"Since we dropped out of the mycelial network, we have received one piece of a transmission, and we are still receiving it."

"Meaning what exactly?" asked Lorca, trying to make sense of Saru's display. He was no slouch when it came to the science aboard the ship, but the data he was looking at was entirely unfamiliar.

Saru considered how to explain. "If you'll forgive me for 'dumbing this down,' captain, imagine if someone were sending us the message 'hello.' In the five minutes since our arrival at this position, we are still in the process of receiving the letter _h_."

"Oh my god," said Stamets over the comms. "We're stuck in time."

* * *

They called a meeting of senior science staff in astrometrics. Saru, Stamets, Mischkelovitz, and two scientists in charge of other projects aboard the ship: Egorova and Kumar, an astrophysicist and systems engineer respectively. For some reason, Groves had come, too.

Stuck in time was not completely accurate. It was more that they were out of sync with time in the rest of the universe. Events on the Discovery were unfolding at what seemed like normal speed for them, but outside of the ship, everything was moving so slowly it appeared almost completely still. In fact, they were still in visual range of the pretty red-orange nebula, but because they were receiving fewer photons, everything looked dimmer.

Furthermore, the mycelial field they used to delineate the ship and its contents for transport through the mycelial network had not dispersed. The spores were similarly frozen, unmoving.

The fact that they were receiving photons and an ongoing bit of a transmission indicated they had not somehow fallen out of time completely. They were simply operating at such a speed that time outside had become meaningless.

"It's like the spore field has become a temporal stasis field," concluded Stamets. "Or maybe not stasis, more like..."

Groves spoke. "Technically-speaking, the most accurate term would be 'temporal retardation,' but good luck getting that past a jury. 'Temporal reduction' works."

"A jury?" echoed Stamets. "I'm sorry, who are you again?"

"Impediment?" wondered Mischkelovitz aloud.

"Deceleration," offered Saru.

"I've got it. You know null space? This is null time," said Groves.

"What?" went Stamets, shaking his head rapidly as if to knock that idea loose from his brain. "That's a math concept! It doesn't mean space as in"—he waved his hands towards the window—"space!"

"No, but it's catchy," countered Groves. Between that and "radical recyclers," Lorca rather got the impression Groves fancied himself a wordsmith. That instinct probably served him well in courtrooms. Slightly less so in this context.

"I like it," said Egorova.

They were getting distracted, as scientists and civilians so often did. "Terminology aside, analysis?" prompted Lorca.

"We cannot leave the field," said Saru. "If we attempt to, I believe we will incur another collision as we did upon exiting the mycelial plane, and we may damage the ship irreparably."

"Do we have to leave?" asked Mischkelovitz. "I mean, if time's passing super-slow on the outside, think how much work we could get done in here."

"Your work, you mean," said Stamets. "Mine would be stuck. Literally. In time."

Egorova touched a finger to her lips. "The spores aren't entirely frozen themselves, are they? They're moving at the same rate as we're receiving information from the outside world. Meaning, eventually, we might just drop out of whatever it is we're experiencing naturally when the field collapses."

"Then it's a question of the rate," said Groves. "How fast is data entering? And is the rate constant, or is it decaying or accelerating?" He looked at Saru for the answer.

"I have detected no discernible change in the rate as far. Computer, based on the time it takes the mycelial field to dissipate and the current rate time is passing aboard the ship, how long until the field naturally decays?"

"Insufficient data," said the computer.

"We don't know exactly how long the mycelial field persists after a jump," said Stamets. It was something they were still crunching numbers on from the various drive tests. "Individual spores can survive anywhere between a fraction of a second to several seconds, and that's just the ones that actually do get expended by the process. Some persist and have to be flushed out manually before the next jump. Then there's also the question of the threshold at which the field itself collapses. So far, we've seen fields persisting post-displacement even at a density of thirty-five percent."

Saru rephrased. "Computer, using the averages observed so far for post-displacement spore persistence, what is the minimum amount of time required for field density to reach forty percent?"

"Six hundred and forty-five years," said the computer.

That was the optimistic estimate. There was one person on the ship who could live long enough to survive that. She was not in the room.

"Well our ship won't last even half that long," said Kumar. "Our systems will decay well before then and we'll run out of power, not to mention food and everything else we need to survive."

"So we need to find a way out," said Groves.

Stamets had been thinking about the passage of time. "Actually, this could be a good thing. If we're not going anywhere, I could fill that cultivation bay with mushrooms. We could get a whole forest growing, ensure a steady supply of spores at a quantity that would let us make multiple test jumps in a day. We would have way more left over for ourselves after supplying the Glenn." It was no secret that, between Straal and Stamets, Stamets was the better gardener, but because Straal's drive jumps were going more successfully, they were getting the lion's share of the spore supply Discovery produced.

"I want us out of here sooner rather than later," said Lorca. As appealing as Stamets and Mischkelovitz might find the idea of unlimited time for various reasons, Lorca had no interest in aging while the rest of the universe passed them by. "Everyone, get your teams together and start working on potential solutions. I want proposals in three hours. Give me everything, no matter how out there, using the resources we have on Discovery."

* * *

Three hours later, they were back, along with the addition of Cadet Tilly.

"'Null time' got me thinking," said Tilly. Stamets had disliked the term and repeated it to his engineering crew derisively, but Tilly had turned it into a positive. "This is really a math problem, and it's a spore field problem. Now, when we're talking about the universe on the scale of the mycelial spore network, we lose the distinction between physics and biology. So, my idea..."

Stamets looked genuinely proud of Tilly for a change as she outlined her proposal to counterbalance the spores with spores modified to be something akin to an anti-spore.

"And we can do this?" asked Lorca. "An anti-spore?"

"Theoretically," stressed Stamets, "but maybe? I mean, it's within the realm of possibility, sir. And having run the math, it looks like it would be perfectly safe to try, so I think Tilly's proposal is worth exploring. It doesn't put the ship in danger."

The same could not be said of every suggestion. Kumar's proposal involved hitting the temporal field with a charged tachyon pulse which would potentially create new, temporally-charged particles sufficient to disrupt the field or cut a hole in it.

As Kumar relayed this, Mischkelovitz began to tug at Groves' arm. Lorca noticed the motion. "Something you want to share, doctor?"

"We're in a chroniton field."

"Chroniton?" repeated Egorova.

"I think the mycelial spores developed a charge that attracted chronitons, coating them in the particles, and the chronitons are holding them suspended in time. In essence, they can't move because they're bogged down by the excess chroniton weight. Not weight or mass in the way we understand it in this physical realm, but in a similar way all the same."

"Chronitons are only theoretical, doctor," said Saru, "but I think the idea has merit, captain. I would trust Mischkelovitz's expertise in this area. It was her husband's primary field of interest."

"I thought he was a weapons engineer," said Kumar, sounding dismissive. He had always felt the Mischkelovitz name overrated. Hearing Kumar's assessment of the deceased scientist, the surviving Mischkelovitz shrank back behind Groves.

Egorova said, "He rarely published in physics, but what he did was remarkable. I didn't know he was involved in temporal research but I wouldn't be surprised."

"And what do you think we should do, Mischka?" said Lorca, drawing her back in.

"The cadet's plan," she said. "If we negate the spores, the chronitons should disperse because they'll have nothing to adhere to. That would release the field. But if we charge the field with tachyons, as the lieutenant commander suggests, we risk causing a casmaclysic cascanade... No. Casme—no. Casmaclysic... No. Casma—no."

"Cataclys—" both Lorca and Groves began.

"—mic cascade," finished Groves, narrowing his eyes at Lorca. Lorca shrugged in response and made a face as if to say, "It was obvious, you think you're the only one can do that?" If the look in Groves' eyes meant anything, it was probably that he felt he was indeed the only person allowed to do that, and Lorca had just violated some sort of unspoken boundary.

"What would make the spores develop a temporal charge in the first place?" asked Stamets, disliking the implication his spores were to blame.

"Residual temporal radiation!" exclaimed Tilly. "We cleared the spores from the chamber when the first module wasn't working, but radiation could have lingered in the chamber. Then, when we put in the next batch of spores, they were contaminated. And because the spores act in concert with one another, it caused a chain reaction! Like a virus!"

Stamets' eyes widened. "Physics as biology!" he exclaimed. "Of course! It wasn't the spores, it was the chamber! As we went through the mycelial plane, the infection spread across the ship, until it dropped us out because we were too heavy with—chronitons!"

Tilly was over the moon. "Yes!"

"How were the spores exposed to temporal radiation in the first place?" said Groves. He seemed to have no trouble following any of the science. Mischkelovitz stood deep in thought, saying nothing in response to this question.

"Perhaps Dr. Mischkelovitz and I could investigate this question while Lieutenant Stamets and the cadet devise a way to create an 'anti-spore,'" said Saru.

"If we're right about this, we could prove chronitons exist!" exclaimed Tilly.

"That's already proven," said Mischkelovitz.

Egorova shook her head. "I'd have heard if chronitons were proven. If anything, we're just gonna prove that mushroom spores are unpredictable, or we got a bad batch, or the mycelial plane we've been traveling through has some temporal mechanics we haven't properly accounted for yet."

"My spores are not the issue," said Stamets defensively.

"Are we all on board with Tilly's plan?" asked Lorca, looking to head off a fight between the scientists.

"I'd like my team to continue research into the field mechanics area," said Egorova.

"Granted," said Lorca. "And Kumar, as a backup, draw up schematics for as many devices as you like, but focus on resource rationing. Just in case our plan A is no good. Everyone know what they're doing?" The assembled scientists responded with nods and words of assent. Lorca clapped his hands and then spread them, palms up. "Then go."


	51. Two Truths and a Lie

A/N: I may have to go back and rewrite a few details depending on what the Landry stuff is tonight... Shouldn't be major rewrites, regardless.

* * *

"The good news is," said Lorca when he made the announcement ship-wide, "the war isn't going anywhere. When we get back out there, it'll be like we never left." This was making two large assumptions. First, that they would get back out there, and second, that they would do it within a reasonable amount of time, because there was a nonzero chance it would take them months or years to escape this temporal bubble.

The bridge was down to a skeleton crew: an ensign at the science station monitoring sensors and a cadet at ops monitoring power usage. The lights were dimmed. When Landry arrived, she found Lorca leaning against the wall near the tactical station, arms crossed, looking bored out of his mind.

"Enjoy the turbolifts while they last," Lorca said to her. Restricting turbolift usage was part of Kumar's proposed "enhanced emergency protocols" for further power conservation.

"What, are we going to have people climb up and down the shaft?" said Landry. She could manage it just fine, but it seemed a fine recipe for someone breaking a neck.

Lorca heard the pun in that and bit his lip to avoid laughing. "If it comes to it," he said, motioning for Landry to join him in the ready room. He took up a position behind his desk.

"So, is this a social call, or..." There were a lot of very young and very bored crew aboard Discovery, and Landry was a little jealous of how quickly they had escalated to entertaining one another without any work to do.

Lorca put his hands on the desk. "I want a complete and total security audit of all personnel on Discovery."

"Busywork?" said Landry. It wasn't a challenge or assessment of his suggestion, it was an honest question. Busywork was probably the best-case scenario for the security department right now.

"Our situation might not be an accident, commander," said Lorca.

At first Landry looked lightly shocked to hear that, but then she was delighted. "I'll find who's responsible, captain. I guess this means no time to spar, then."

Lorca slid out from behind the desk and ran his hand up Landry's back to the nape of her neck. "If I want a sparring match, you'll just have to make time, commander."

Under the circumstances, making time wasn't very hard to do.

* * *

The first thing they did was retrieve the contaminated module and spores from engineering. Not the spores that were trapped in the drive system currently—those they were pointedly avoiding tampering with for now—the spores Stamets had flushed out prior to their ill-fated jump, the remnants of which were still present in the waste system.

If Mischkelovitz's theory was to be believed, these spores were likely as bogged down in chronitons as the rest due to their temporal charge, but they weren't connected to the active mycelial field, so they could be extracted without significant risk. Sure enough, the discarded spores seemed temporally locked. The selected a small quantity for their own research and provided the rest to Stamets for his.

"Is there anything I can do to help?" asked Tilly, hovering around Mischkelovitz.

Mischkelovitz shrank away from Tilly and hid behind Saru. Saru could tell that, while Mischkelovitz had been supportive of Tilly's suggestions in the meeting, she did not like interacting with her for some reason.

"I think we can handle it, cadet," said Saru diplomatically. In the hallway, he inquired as to Mischkelovitz's issue.

"I don't know her," said Mischkelovitz simply. They were transporting the contaminated module on a pushcart with a mobile containment field. Transporters were offline until further notice.

"You cannot interact only with people you know," said Saru.

"Why not?" said Mischkelovitz. "That's what John's for, to interact with people for me. I don't really like people."

"In my experience, people are largely good, if you give them the chance."

"Okay," said Mischkelovitz, which was her way of dismissing both the idea and the conversation subject entirely.

Saru considered Mischkelovitz. There was something sad about her beyond of the death of her husband. The fact that she had not integrated with anyone in the crew besides the people in and about her lab was apparently more to do with who she was as a person than the secret nature of her experiment.

They found Groves and Lalana sharing an apple in the lab's main area when they arrived. Groves was holding a paring knife. "Hey, have some apple before it goes bad. Might be the last one for a while." He offered Saru a piece on the knife.

Saru accepted the slice, ganglia tingling at the sight of the blade. Even without the knowledge this might be the last apple any of them ate for the foreseeable future, it was delicious. Green, juicy, and tart.

Lalana withdrew to her quarters and Saru and Mischkelovitz got to work. The cloak detection project was on hold for the time being. Until they solved this temporal bubble situation, there was nothing for Lalana to do. Groves, equally, had no real purpose, but remained in the lab all the same, sitting off to the side and staying out of their way.

They lacked the correct tools to detect the chronitons, according to Mischkelovitz, but they were able to detect lingering temporal energy and confirm the module itself was the likely source of the contamination by comparing it to their scans of engineering.

"But what contaminated it?" wondered Saru aloud.

O'Malley came in. "Dinner?" he asked. Groves invited Saru to join them in the mess. This, Saru knew, was their daily ritual. O'Malley, Mischkelovitz, and Groves always ate this one meal together and it felt like something of an honor to be invited to join.

The food rationing was already in effect. "Oh my god," said O'Malley, staring at the meager portions as they made their way to a table. "You've got to get us out of here, Melly."

"Dr. Mischkelovitz and I are investigating the cause of our predicament. It's Lieutenant Stamets and his team who are charged with finding a way out," clarified Saru.

"Oh?" said O'Malley, and Saru realized O'Malley didn't care about the details at all. He really only cared about the food. They sat down and began to eat. O'Malley looked at the bit of green on his fork. "This is a goddamn travesty. Is nothing sacred?"

"Tch," went Groves, taking offense at the word choice. "Sacred? Really, Mac."

"I didn't mean it in a literal sense," said O'Malley, glaring.

"No fighting at dinner," said Mischkelovitz. This was apparently something of a hard rule; both O'Malley and Groves immediately apologized.

"Tell me, Saru, does your species have any religions?" asked O'Malley.

"No," said Saru. "After living so many years in a futile and hopeless situation, we realized there was no higher power coming to provide us any salvation. Surely if there were, it would not have waited so many generations to come to our aid."

"Shame," said O'Malley. "It can be quite a comfort, even if it is all a lie."

"I'll take a comforting lie over a truth any day," said Groves, which seemed an odd thing to say given his position on religion. (In fact, he would have taken the comfort of religion, if only he could bring himself to believe in it, which was why he was so angry about the subject.)

"I'll take the truth," said O'Malley, which again, seemed at odds with his earlier statement.

"And what about you, Dr. Mischkelovitz?"

Mischkelovitz thought about the question carefully. "It depends," she said at last, "on whose lie it is, and why they're telling it."

* * *

Groves left after dinner and O'Malley took up a position outside the door, leaving Saru and Mischkelovitz free to continue their investigation well into the night. As midnight came and went, Mischkelovitz said to Saru, "You don't have to stay up on my account. I usually work late."

"Kelpiens sleep very little," said Saru. "Out of a need for constant vigilance for predators."

"Ah!" said Mischkelovitz brightly. "They can get you when you're sleeping, unless you find a good place to hide. Mischka finds the best places to hide."

Saru considered that with a vague feeling of dread, because unlike Lorca, Saru understood something from his conversation with Mischkelovitz about her husband some weeks earlier.

Mischka wasn't Emellia Mischkelovitz. Mischka was Milosz.

* * *

Lorca was still going over security footage in the ready room well after he would normally have gone to bed. Somewhere, someone on Landry's team was doing the same, but Lorca felt obliged to do his own review. So far, he had not been able to find anything out of the ordinary in engineering that would account for the jump issue. He had watched Stamets run around alternating between contentment and various degrees of stress, Tilly trail Stamets like a lost puppy looking to help and sometimes managing to do so, and various other engineering personnel go about their duties in an utterly normal fashion. At one point, he even watched himself deliver Stamets yet another performance ultimatum that Stamets failed to live up to.

The comms beeped. "Lab 26 to Captain Lorca." It was Lalana. After a long moment of careful consideration, Lorca answered. Lalana forewent any greeting and launched right into a question: "Are you all right, Gabriel? It is oh-two-thirty."

"Is it?" he asked, blinking and rubbing his eyes. It was. He groaned. "Just... working on something. Sorry about the holocomms." They were currently disabled as a power-saving measure.

"You sound exhausted. Your voice is almost as good your face, you know, at telling your truth."

"Is it now." He was far too tired to do anything but make the most basic observations. "You're probably right. I should go to bed." She had not actually suggested he do so.

"Is there anything I can help with?"

That was a fair question. "You want to watch five weeks worth of security footage?"

"If it will help, then yes."

The question had not been a serious one, but having said it, even in jest, Lorca suddenly was struck by how good an idea it was. Lalana was among the least likely to have perpetrated the sabotage, because while she was certainly capable of moving about the ship undetected, she lived under lock and key behind a guarded door and could not have beamed anywhere in order to perpetrate the sabotage.

Except, if she had somehow managed to escape confinement, it was the perfect sabotage because she alone would live long enough to escape the temporal field. So maybe she was the culprit.

Then again, why would she want to kill them all? She was on the ship voluntarily. If she wanted to be rid of them, she had only to contact Cornwell and request to leave. Moreover, why would she want him dead? Or was this a ploy to spend more time with him? Was the nighttime holocomm chat not enough?

Could she disguise herself so well she would be invisible on cameras? It seemed unlikely. The security monitors captured multiple angles. The idea of her perfectly matching her fur patterns to the angles present in the footage seemed extreme. Plus, no matter what color she was, she still had a shadow, and engineering was never empty. Someone would have noticed an alien of her size and shape in the room. Right? Camouflaging yourself on a starship was a great deal different than camouflaging yourself in a forest of trees, where you had an abundance of forgiving, irregular textures and patterns.

If she had not left the lab herself, perhaps she had gotten someone else to do the deed for her? A witting or unwitting accomplice? Who had then trapped themselves in the same predicament?

That was a point he had come back to a few times now over the past six hours: unless someone how managed to get aboard and then leave Discovery undetected, the culprit was likely still among them, and therefore might have the means to undo this state of affairs themselves. Except there were much easier ways to disable a starship and its crew once you were aboard. A pathogen, explosives, command overrides. What was the point of a time-lock, specifically? Was this about sabotaging the spore drive in particular? An attempt to make them stop trying to pursue the technology altogether?

He had not said anything in almost four minutes. "Are you still there, Gabriel?"

There was no real risk in having her watch the footage. So long as he made sure she could not delete or alter it, the worst she might do is try to pretend nothing was there or point fingers in some sort of false flag operation. "I'm transferring you access to the security footage on the ship. Look for anything out of the ordinary."

"Certainly. Will you please get some sleep now?"

"Yes," he said. If nothing else, he was willing to admit he was getting nothing out of the security logs at this point given how tired he was. The past four hours he had been staring at them mostly out of the nagging obsession he was missing something really obvious.

She signed off with her traditional words goodnight: "May your sleep be unencumbered, and tomorrow be a brighter day."

For all their sakes, he hoped it was.


	52. The Danger Within

A/N: Well, no Landry reveal for me worry about (phew!) but THAT just happened, and I just want to assure you, EVERYTHING IS GOING TO BE OKAY. No, seriously. I didn't realize they were going to do what they did so soon, but, the events of "What's Past is Prologue" were entirely foreseen and I already took them into account with all the future chapters that are written. Stick with me. I'm here to help. We'll get through this together.

* * *

Two days went by uneventfully. "We have confirmed beyond a doubt that the spore contamination originated in the module itself," Saru reported. They were in Lorca's study, surrounded by implements of death. With a bare and unchanging view of the stars and nowhere to go, Lorca was finding the bridge and adjoining ready room untenable. He had even gone so far as to move the bowl of fortune cookies down here. The study was now his base of operations.

"Good," said Lorca, but it wasn't. "Did you find any devices or settings or anything that would even hint as to a cause?"

"We have not."

Lorca pressed a hand against his face in frustration. The problem with the source of the contamination being the module was that the modules were reusable and he had already traced the module from the last time it was used to the moment there had been a problem. No one had touched it in the intervening days.

"All right. Dismissed, Saru."

The Kelpien did not immediately leave. Normally, he would have bolted. He hated this room, with all of its many hunting implements. His ganglia had been writhing in the air since he walked in. "There was something else, captain. Dr. Mischkelovitz... I believe she may be unwell."

Just what they needed, a medical emergency. "It's not because of this null time, is it?" The term had caught on, to Stamets' eternal chagrin.

"No, sir. I believe the doctor is unstable, entirely unrelated to our current predicament."

This was not news to Lorca. "Can she do the work, Saru?"

"Yes, captain."

"On this ship, that is the _only_ thing that matters."

Saru remained unconvinced. In his regular assessment of the cloak project, he had checked in on Lab 26 repeatedly, but actually working in there was revealing a lot about the way Mischkelovitz functioned. Or more accurately, failed to. She did not eat unless prompted, did not go to sleep unless prompted, lost herself in her work to the point of ignoring basic needs and hygiene, and despite O'Malley's assertion to Lorca on day one that you got used to Groves and Mischkelovitz speaking to each other in an unknown language, Saru was not finding this to be the case.

Lorca watched the uncertainty in Saru. "You have a problem with that, number one?"

"I accept it, captain, but another thing bothers me."

If nothing else, Lorca had learned that Saru's evolutionary instincts for trouble were usually worth acknowledging. "What's that?"

"Do you suspect someone may have tampered with the module?"

"Suspect," confirmed Lorca. His question as to the presence of any devices on the module was certainly clue enough.

"I would think, as first officer, that I should have been informed of your suspicion."

Lorca smiled. "Apologies, Saru. I wanted to see what you came up with independently. If you'd known I was looking at sabotage, it might have colored your results."

"That's very scientific of you, captain," said Saru appreciatively. "But I assure you, I would investigate all avenues of explanation regardless."

"You're right. My mistake." Lorca did not promise it wouldn't happen again, because if he chose to keep things from his first officer, that was his prerogative.

"In light of a potential saboteur, I am concerned how you'll take this, sir, but, I struggle to see how this effect could be the result of a natural phenomenon and it strikes me as quite a coincidence that we have encountered a temporal anomaly when the wife of an expert in the field is aboard."

Lorca's eyes widened slightly. Mischkelovitz was the one saying chronitons and Mischkelovitz was the one investigating the source of the problem (though it had been Saru's suggestion she do so). She also had expressed interest in using null time as a chance to perform research. Lorca's voice went cold. "Saru, get down to the lab and send Mischkelovitz up here. Don't let her or anyone else touch anything on that module until I give you the go-ahead. But don't tip them off that we suspect anything."

"Yes, captain." Saru exited, worried that Lorca had just drawn the one conclusion he had been hoping to avoid. Mischkelovitz was odd, yes, but nothing in Saru's instincts indicated she was a danger to anyone but herself, and even if she did have some familiarity with chronitons as she asserted, she seemed to lack the degree of technical know-how to implement this knowledge in any meaningful way. Everything she knew was secondhand.

Lorca pressed the button for the comms. "Egorova, get up here."

Egorova arrived before Mischkelovitz. "Natalya, I need your unvarnished assessment about this chroniton business," said Lorca.

"In what way?"

"Mischkelovitz says chronitons, and you say no?"

Egorova was a cautious scientist. She surpassed even Stamets in this regard. It was, in Lorca's estimation, her greatest flaw. "It's not that it's not chronitons, it very well could be. It's simply, we have no way to confirm chronitons or not. It would be more accurate to say we're dealing with exotic temporal particles which may or may not be what theoretical physics describes as chronitons."

"What are the chances we encounter 'exotic temporal particles' with someone who's seen them before on board?"

"What are the chances we use mushrooms to traverse space?"

Lorca's voice immediately dropped into a warning tone. "Don't be coy with me."

"Captain, if I had—"

The door chimed. It was Mischkelovitz with Groves tagging along. Lorca pointed at Groves. "No!" he said, with a shake of his head.

Groves looked offended and opened his mouth to object.

"Out!" barked Lorca, pointing at the door.

Mischkelovitz looked terrified as Groves deserted her. Lorca ignored it for the time being. He hit the comms and told the security officer outside, "Take Mr. Groves for a walk. I don't want him hanging around." Then he bade Egorova continue.

It took Egorova a moment to regain her train of thought. "Sir, I think you're suggesting the presence of these particles is because Dr. Mischkelovitz is here? Because she identified them as chronitons?" Egorova was cautious, not dumb. "I mean, the only thing I fault her for is saying chronitons in the first place. I reached the same conclusion as to the presence of exotic particles on my own. Any physicist would have. There's definitely a particle cohesion effect that explains the symptoms we're experiencing, and the particles are temporal in nature. It's undeniable."

Mischkelovitz said something. It came out as an inaudible whimper.

"What was that, Mischka?" Lorca asked. He watched very carefully the wide-eyed fear in Mischkelovitz's uneven eyes. There were two things being tested here, and the results of the second were shaping up as Saru had suggested. "Egorova, you're dismissed."

Egorova left with a trailing glance at Mischkelovitz. Lorca held out the bowl of fortune cookies towards Mischkelovitz. For once, this did not work. She was rooted in place and did not lift her hand to take one. The only indication she was even aware of the cookies was a faint twitch in her finger.

"Mischka," said Lorca, putting the bowl back down. "Talk to me."

He could make out her words now. "It's my fault," she said, her voice the palest whisper. "It has to be. This... this is the same way we found chronitons. Temporal charticle parge. I mean... particle charge. But, I don't... I don't..."

She was crumpling fast without Groves to lean on. "Did you do something?" asked Lorca, slowly and carefully and in an entirely neutral tone. Mischkelovitz shook her head. "Did you bring something aboard Discovery?" Again, her head shook. "Then how did you do this?"

"I don't know! But it can't be a coincidence, can it?" She looked up at him, eyes filling with tears. They spilled over onto her cheeks. "I don't know, I don't know! I don't have the device Mischka used! They took it!"

It wasn't a great feeling, making a woman cry. "Who took it?"

"Starfleet. Starfleet took everything. Our workshop, everything we worked on. They said our research was secret. They took it. They took it. The device, it was a temporal charge accelerator. It made... it made certain charticles attrack ponicons, like a magnet." She did not even notice the mix-up of words at this point, but Lorca was able to decipher the intended phrase as "particles attract chronitons." Maybe the word mangling was the source of Saru's concerns. It seemed a harmless enough quirk. "And when there were enough of them, it made them frozen. But only briefly! Not sustained! They only stayed frozen for seconds! The energy it took to make the charge, it wasn't... It was too much to be sustained."

"Did you bring any of this aboard my ship?"

Her breaths were jagged sobs. "How could I! They took it away! But..." She devolved into sobbing.

The study, like every important room designated for the captain, had a private bathroom. Lorca fetched a cloth and handed it to Mischkelovitz to dry her eyes. "I don't think you did this," he said. "I think it's too big a coincidence it happened around you, but I don't think you're behind it."

Mischkelovitz clutched the towel against her chest and shook her head.

"You wouldn't do anything to hurt me or the ship, would you?" He smiled at her kindly.

"No, sir."

"Do you know what the most potent weapon in this room is, Mischka?" For what felt like the hundredth time, she shook her head. Lorca grinned. "I'm lookin' at it right now." He was looking at her. "Human ingenuity and intelligence. So you dry those tears and remember this. I chose you, Mischka. Because your mind is special, and you're gonna get us out of here. You take as long as you need right now, but then you get right back out there and figure out how to unravel this mess. Got it?"

Finally, her head nodded. She returned his smile with one of her own. "Yes, captain!"

"Now!" he said with a degree of finality, picking up the bowl of fortune cookies again. "Let's keep this conversation between us."

* * *

When Mischkelovitz left, Lorca sent word to Saru to allow Mischkelovitz to continue her work unhindered, only to find Saru had news of his own. "Lalana wishes me to tell you she has found something." Lorca darted into the hallway. "Hold the lift!" he called out.

Mischkelovitz was in the turbolift, surprised, seeing as she had left him all of forty seconds ago. "I have to talk to Lalana," Lorca explained lamely.

"Oh," said Mischkelovitz, taking her finger off the door hold button. The doors slid shut and they were alone again.

The lift took a little longer than usual in low-power mode. It had a lower hum to it, too, and the lights were dim. Everywhere on the ship the lights were dimmer now, and it suited Lorca just fine.

"I'm sorry I cried," said Mischkelovitz after a moment. "I hate crying. It's pathetic."

"Nonsense," said Lorca. "It's... part of who you are." It sounded like forgiveness.

"Still. I wish I were the type of person who never cried."

Lorca considered that, hands tightening behind his back, and said nothing.

The lift doors opened and they turned towards the lab. O'Malley was waiting in the hall, not at his post so much as standing in the hallway. "Melly!" he exclaimed, and dashed forward, putting a hand on Mischkelovitz's shoulder. "Are you all right, love?" He glanced at Lorca darkly.

"I'm fine," she said. Lorca continued past them towards the lab, but could hear their exchange continue in his wake. "I promise, Mally. Really. I got a new fortune!" It had been very magnanimous of her, taking only a single cookie from the bowl as a price for her silence.

"'You will soon be crossing great waters.' What the does that mean?"

"Dunno. I guess we'll find out!"

"Doctor?" said Lorca, waiting just inside the outer lab doors.

There was a strange look on O'Malley's face as Mischkelovitz joined Lorca. Somehow curious but potentially damning. The outer doors closed and the inner doors opened. Saru and Lalana were waiting. Lorca winced at the light in the lab and covered his eyes. Since the rest of the ship was so dim right now, he had neglected to take his ocular spray with him.

"Computer, dim lights!" said Mischkelovitz, and smiled at him.

"Thank you. Lalana? Saru?"

They made their way into Lalana's room and Lalana took up a position near the monitor. "I think I have found the person responsible for what happened to the spore drive, but I think also that I have not."

"No riddles, Lalana," said Lorca.

"Unfortunately, a riddle is what I have found." She touched the monitor controls with her tail. A video feed of the wall where the containment modules were stored appeared. The wall was unattended. Lalana hit play. Three seconds later, she stopped the playback. "And there it was."

"What?" said Lorca. It was three seconds of empty air.

"It was so fast, even I can barely see it, and I have twelve pupils to receive visual data with. In fact, had I not come up with a better way to review the footage, I would probably never have found it myself. But since reviewing five weeks of footage in detail was inefficient, I applied the optical differential filter Emellia put on the holocomms. Thus, instead of watching the footage itself, I watched the differences between the frames. This allowed me to wholesale discard sections of video without any changes, and to quickly parse the changes that did appear. When you view the video using the filter, this is what it looks like."

Lalana replayed the video with the filter applied. The image was totally grey, indicating no change from frame to frame, and then suddenly there was a flash of color that vanished so quickly it was hard to be certain it had existed in the first place.

"It is visible in only one frame," said Lalana. "This frame." She brought the frame up in its differential state. Most of the frame was grey, but there was a long, irregular shape to the right of the center and almost touching the bottom of the frame. Lalana turned the filter off.

The frame looked empty. Lalana began to fiddle with the settings, adjusting the contrast. As she did, a ghostlike smudge appeared, about the size of a human, standing right in front of the exact module that had been contaminated. Though mostly transparent, there was a darkness to the color, especially near the middle. It made Lorca think the culprit was wearing black.

"Remarkable," said Saru.

Lorca brought a hand to his mouth. "I don't believe it." He had watched the exact same footage a dozen or more times and still not caught it. He had even asked the computer to review the footage without result.

"My eyes see more than humans' do. I hope this helps, but, I believe it only raises more questions. Colonel O'Malley reviewed the footage for me and confirmed the source has not been tampered with in any way. We are not looking at a visual remnant that has been erased or overwritten in the system, or a glitch in the footage. We are looking at someone whose presence was so brief it barely registered on a single frame of the recording. I think whoever did this possessed the technology to freeze themselves in time. Much in the way we have been frozen."

"Saru, get Mischkelovitz," said Lorca.

"Wait," said Lalana. Lorca looked at her. The giant green eyes were staring up at him and her tail was flicking in seeming agitation. "I realize you are approaching this event as a human does, and as a Kelpien does, Saru. But I approach this as a lului. So many times the things I say have been misunderstood in human context. With that in mind, I think this action is being misunderstood as well. I do not think the person who did this intended us harm. I think, captain, that this may be a gift."

"Why would you think that?"

"Because someone who possesses this technology could have done anything with it. They could have walked through the ship and killed each of us by hand, and we would never have known. Instead, they put us in a temporal bubble in a very intentional way. Because it is intentional, I believe the person who did this has means to undo it. They are simply waiting for something."

"Waiting for what?" asked Saru.

"That is the question we must answer."


	53. In for a Penny

A/N: I apologize for this blatantly ridiculous chapter, which is fairly long. I especially apologize for Groves' existence. He prides himself on being ridiculous. But there's a good reason he's along for the ride. We'll need him later.

* * *

Lorca eventually sent Saru off to update Landry on the status of the investigation and remained in Lalana's room, bouncing ideas off her.

"Do you think they want us to realize something about the spore drive?" he wondered aloud. Lalana's rooms were warm enough that he had taken off his uniform tunic, shoes, and socks. The t-shirt underneath was regulation black, as always.

"Perhaps the point is the development of the 'anti-spore' you mentioned. Certainly the crew would not be undertaking that if we were not in null time." Lalana was sitting on the hammock directly behind the couch. This put her out of eyesight unless he tilted his head back, which he did now.

"So, somebody freezes time to force us to develop an anti-spore? How could they even know we'd try that?"

"Emellia said her husband's work was decades if not centuries away from practical application at the level displayed by the shadow-man." This was Lalana's term for Lorca's saboteur. She still rejected the idea of it being outright sabotage. "Perhaps he is from the future, so he knew what we would do."

Lorca tilted his head back down. "You're talking about creating a time loop. It's chicken and the egg. How could the shadow-man have known the outcome of null time before he caused it?"

"Because he's from the future."

Lorca sighed. The logic was fully circular, but there was something to it. Either they were being visited by a time-traveling saboteur, or someone was running around the galaxy with a vast temporal power and had chosen to employ it on Discovery for unknown reasons.

"Do you know, your grey hairs are showing."

"What?" Lorca sat up, alarmed, and self-consciously touched the side of his head where the grey tended to appear. "They are not. I don't have grey hairs."

She clicked her tongue at him. "Of course you don't, Gabriel, not yet, but if we do not get out of this situation soon, others will start to notice when eventually you run out of hair dye. I do not think you have fully taken this into consideration."

Lorca covered his face and groaned. She knew him too well, she really did, and she was having a good laugh at his expense right now.

Her tail flicked down and brushed the top of his head. He peered out from his hand and wrinkled his nose at the motion. She said, "If you bring me the dye, I will fix it for you with such precision you will not run out for many months."

He tilted his head back again and looked up at her. "Appreciated, but it's not needed because we're getting out of here soon, so I can use as much as I damn well please."

"I believe that you believe that," said Lalana. A perfect non-statement. It wasn't even clear if she was referring to his belief they would escape soon, or the idea that he had no need to conserve the tools of his own vanity. Probably it was both.

"I don't mind a few grey hairs," he said pointedly.

"Yes, you do," she said. "As usual, you protest hardest at the truth."

"Right, well, to get back to the topic at hand, what do you think the shadow-man wants us to do?"

"Perhaps it is not us. It could be anyone on the ship."

"Be honest. You think you're so special it must be you," he said in jest.

Lalana chose to take the statement at face value. "I am not special. I am background radiation. That is the opposite of special. The one who is special is you."

"You think I'm the key?" It was hard not to be swayed by the flattery, but Lorca suspected if any single person was the key to this, it was Mischkelovitz. She had the prior connection to the chronitons and the technology in play. He sat up, said in mock seriousness, "Shadow-man! Let us out! That's an order from your captain!"

Nothing happened except Lalana clicked her tongue.

"Not me," concluded Lorca, settling back. "We can also rule out making Mischkelovitz cry, because if that was the secret, we'd have been out of here five times over by now." He started laughing. Lalana clicked her tongue and swatted his head lightly with her tail.

"That was mean, Gabriel!" managed Lalana, but her tongue kept clicking.

"It doesn't make it wrong!" He ended his laugh with a yawn. "It's getting late."

"You can stay here if you like and sleep on the couch."

"Your quarters are a little too warm for my taste." This was an understatement. The temperature could be described as tropical, even if the humidity was slightly lacking.

"Then take off more clothes." He blinked in disbelief. Lalana's tongue started clicking again. She was joking with him, of course. "Go on, then. Maybe Ellen will still be up." It was just after midnight, so probably not, but a lot of crew schedules were getting disrupted absent the meaningful passage of time. Forcing people to live by the ship's clock only went so far when more than half the crew was on standby with nothing really to do besides manual busywork that served only to pass the time.

Lorca sighed and pulled on his socks and shoes. A thought occurred to him. "What if it were Milosz Mischkelovitz, come back from beyond the grave?"

"How would that even work?"

"Honestly? I don't know." The spores clearly had some temporal properties, so maybe a time ghost wasn't completely out of the question.

"I think that would be sad," said Lalana.

"And if it were me, back from the dead to haunt you?"

"What is dead is dead."

Another non-statement. Lorca sighed again and went to the door. "Goodnight, Lalana."

"May your sleep be unencumbered," she said.

"And tomorrow be a brighter day," he finished. Everything on the ship was beginning to feel so predictable. He preemptively closed his eyes as he hit the door controls, expecting to find the lab lights on full.

The lights were dim and the lab was empty. Mischkelovitz seemed to have already gone to bed. Lorca made his way out, slipping his tunic back on in the outer chamber as he waited for the doors to cycle.

O'Malley was standing just outside, apparently waiting for him. "Captain," said the colonel. "A word?" Allan was on shift as well, looking pointedly forward and ignoring them both in the manner a true security professional.

"It's late, colonel," said Lorca.

"I am aware, captain. But as you're here..."

Lorca yawned again. "You have three minutes."

O'Malley motioned for them to move to the next section of corridor and closed the containment doors on both sides for privacy, alarming Lorca. O'Malley was armed with a phaser rifle. Lorca was armed with wit and good looks. In a fight, the phaser rifle seemed to have the advantage. O'Malley said, "Right. What exactly are your intentions regarding Emellia? Are you going to take her off the ship?"

"Not if I don't have to," managed Lorca, yawning again.

"Here's the thing, captain. I think, and maybe it's a bit mad, but she seems happier here than she's been anywhere else since Milosz died. I know Saru has concerns, he's mentioned as much to John, and John certainly has strong feelings, but I'd appreciate it if you'd continue to give her a chance. I realize she's... herself..."

That was one word for it.

"But she really is brilliant, and if anyone can crack this cloak detection problem under these circumstances, it's her."

"You're assuming we get out of null time in one piece," pointed out Lorca.

"Oh, absolutely. Of that I have no doubt. Too many bright minds on this ship for us to fail. So then, I'll have your word, captain? You won't remove Emellia from Discovery?"

Lorca did not answer immediately. There was really no telling what the future might hold and any promise on the subject was potentially a lie. "You have my word."

O'Malley extended a hand. They shook on it.

"What does it matter to you what happens to Mischka?" asked Lorca.

"You might say our fates are tied. Goodnight, captain." O'Malley opened the doors and returned to his post.

Lorca watched O'Malley go. The man was a question mark in a lot of ways. Internal security personnel files were notoriously sparse on detail, and O'Malley's was no exception. Lorca knew less about him on paper than almost anyone on the ship. He could tell O'Malley and Mischkelovitz had history, and O'Malley's words seemed to imply it went back to some point before the Battle of the Binaries, when Milosz had been alive. Was O'Malley responsible for taking away Milosz's work on temporal mechanics and was now guarding the widow out of a guilty conscience?

It was too late to figure it out now. Lorca resumed his trek towards bed.

* * *

Based on the single frame, they determined the shadow-man to be between five-foot-eight and five-eleven. This range included most of the male population of Discovery, including Lorca, and several of the women, though the silhouette felt more instinctively male. It conclusively ruled out O'Malley, who was too short unless he had taken to wearing stilettos, and Larsson, who was too tall. Not that Lorca had ever seriously entertained the idea of the Swede of all people being involved in some sort of temporal shenanigans. Larsson was rather like a cinder block. Even time could not move him.

Saru, Landry, and Mischkelovitz were also excluded. Again, not real candidates. That still left Groves as an option, and as ridiculous as it sounded, the idea of Milosz's ghost, because Lorca had no idea how tall the deceased scientist had been. Not that Lorca seriously thought it was a ghost. Perhaps Milosz had discovered some way to encode himself into a temporal plane and created a time remnant as part of his research. At this point, nothing was really off the table.

Except for fungicide. "We cannot use fungicide," said Stamets. They were at another meeting of the senior science staff in astrometrics and Kumar had come up with the idea. "For starters, the spores are trapped in time, so they probably won't even react to an external force of that nature. Then there's the issue that fungicide doesn't just negate spores, it causes a reaction, and adding energy to the system is the reason we can't use a tachyon beam. Right?"

Mischkelovitz nodded her head once.

"How is fungicide different from an anti-spore?" asked Groves.

Egorova explained. "In this instance, an anti-spore isn't really a spore so much as it is a set of particles that possess compatible characteristics to the mycelial particles. When they interact, they re-bond the mycelial particles into a non-mycelial configuration. Theoretically." The word was not intended as a slight against Stamets' lack of progress, but Stamets glowered all the same.

Groves squinted. "What about an anti-chroniton? Negate the temporal particles instead of the mycelial ones."

"If we had the capability to measure the temporal particles, I'd be all for it," said Egorova, "but we don't."

"And we don't have the technology to generate exotic temporal particles," said Saru.

Egorova had some new ideas of her own. "I've been thinking that we might be able to disrupt the field by transporting particles. It would take a very particular beam configuration, but it might work. There also may be a way to draw energy from the system, which would hasten the time it takes the mycelial field to reach the point of collapse."

"That, I like," said Stamets.

"It's interesting, actually," said Egorova, a clear sign she was heading into an aside. "The temporal particles would have naturally detached by now except the mycelial spores provide an excellent power source. Honestly, I'm beginning to really appreciate your research, Paul."

"Thank you!" said Stamets, completely forgiving her for the "theoretical" remark earlier. "It's nice to be recognized." He tilted his head sharply, shamelessly directing this dig at Lorca.

"Kumar, update me on the rationing and power consumption," said Lorca before the conversation devolved into more flattery of Paul Stamets.

After the meeting's end, Lorca held Groves back, waving Mischkelovitz out.

"If this is about me being in these meetings," began Groves as the door closed.

"It's not." Lorca found Groves a useful inclusion, even if he mostly served as a sounding board for the scientists. "I'd like to invite you to dine with me tonight."

"I'll let Mischka—"

"No. Just you."

Groves squinted at Lorca. "Are you hitting on me?"

Lorca rolled his eyes. He regretted this already. "No. Nineteen hundred hours. Dismissed."

Groves walked out looking dazed. Lorca heard Mischkelovitz ask him what was discussed but did not hear the reply. Culber was waiting to enter. "Could I speak with you a minute, captain?"

Lorca waved his hand in assent.

Culber was growing concerned about the crew's mental state. "People are getting stir-crazy, captain, and it's only been a week. From what Paul tells me, we could be stuck in here for months."

"We'll get out of here before then," said Lorca.

"I wish I had your confidence. As it is, I think we need to seriously consider what the crew is doing while they're off-duty."

Lorca raised his eyebrows in mock surprise. "Are we running out of contraceptives, doctor? Personally, I'm not a huge fan of abstinence." He chuckled.

Culber did not find it funny. "Captain."

"Well, I hear board games are all the rage," said Lorca. The classic pastime was enjoying a sudden recurrence as an allowed recreational activity that consumed no active power beyond the initial fabrication of parts.

"The crew can't play board games for weeks on end."

"What would you have me do, doctor?" asked Lorca. "If we try to bring more systems online, then you'd better hope I'm right about us getting out of here." As it was, Lorca was doing everything possible to maintain a sense of discipline and order in a situation where there seemed to be no immediate point. He was personally overseeing the most trivial of assignments to ensure compliance and maintaining as strict a schedule as he could for everyone to remind them this was a military ship with a highly-trained crew. For the most part, it seemed to be working, but the majority of the crew were on shorter shifts out of necessity. There was barely enough work available for everyone to feel they were contributing in any meaningful way.

Really, the person he was most failing with the schedule was himself, because he'd restlessly stayed up late too many nights in a row at this point, and he was starting to feel it. He was puffy-eyed and short-tempered.

"We should organize activities," said Culber.

"Like a pleasure cruise?" said Lorca distastefully. He had made every attempt to avoid having his commands devolve into such frivolity. Now fate had decided to make him eat his words.

"If that's what you want to call it. We keep people active, engaged, and happy."

Lorca exhaled heavily. "Fine. Congratulations, doctor, you just nominated yourself for the job of cruise director."

"I'll have a full list of suggested activities for you tomorrow."

"Don't bother. Just do whatever the hell you want, so long as it doesn't consume any power."

"Thank you." Culber started to leave, then hesitated. "Captain, I can see this is taking a toll on you. I'm here to talk if you need to."

Lorca closed his eyes and touched a hand to his forehead. "Thank you, but no," he said.

"You're a part of this crew," said Culber.

"Dismissed, doctor."

After Culber was gone, Lorca learned on the base of the astrometrics display console and sighed heavily. Culber was right, unfortunately. This was taking a toll. He had never been so stuck in his life. The idea they were getting out of here soon was the only thing keeping him going. He couldn't even turn on the starmap and mess with it as a distraction like he usually did. It would be a waste of power.

How desperately he missed the stars.

* * *

Groves arrived ten minutes late. "Sorry, I didn't know if I was coming," was his excuse.

"You were ordered to come," said Lorca.

"That was an order?"

"Anything a captain says to you is an order."

"I just don't see it," said Groves, with a shrug. "This is why I never joined Starfleet."

"You're in Starfleet now."

The captain's mess was a very nice room, even with the lower lighting Lorca preferred. The colors were silvery and the table could seat six comfortably and eight without trouble. There was none of the sentimentality and warmth that had been Georgiou's trademark in her dining room. No wood, only metal, and recessed lighting with a blue hue. There were curved lines in the surface of the table that felt halfway between abstract and geometric and provided a visual point of interest. The only actual decoration was a schematic of the Buran on the best-lit wall of the room. Groves looked at it curiously.

"That's the Buran. Your ship that was destroyed," Groves noted.

"To serve as a reminder," said Lorca. He offered Groves a glass of wine.

Groves waved his hand. "Just water, thank you."

They sat down. Groves whistled when he took the cover off the plate. "We're on food rationing and you're..."

"Eating the perishables," said Lorca, smirking.

"I'm pretty sure steak keeps a long time in cryo," said Groves. "Not that I'm complaining." He smiled at the plate and picked up the fork and knife. "So what am I doing here, other than keeping you company?"

"I was hoping for the chance to pick your brain."

"Oh? What on?" Groves expertly sliced into his steak. Not the type to wait to get to the meat of things, it seemed.

"Your colleagues."

Groves froze with the fork halfway to his mouth. He took the bite and chewed a little too thoroughly before swallowing and reaching for his water. "And you thought you'd ask me instead of them?" He took a long draught of water for good measure.

Lorca was disappointed to see Groves so quickly rattled. He covered his annoyance with a liberal dose of charm. "Yes, well, aside from the news coverage, I found Dr. Mischkelovitz's file to be a little bare for a member of Starfleet, and I'm curious about the good doctor. You seem to know her well."

Groves set his water down. "I suppose."

Groves had clearly sussed out that this dinner was in fact an excuse for an informal interrogation, and, in typical lawyer fashion, he was offering short, spare answers. Though this was Lorca's intention, he knew he was unlikely to get far with Groves in this state of mind. "No need to be defensive, counselor, I'm just looking for some insights. I know Saru's spoken to you about Mischkelovitz continuing aboard Discovery once we're out of this little predicament."

"Little predicament" was not the words Groves would have used. "He said you intended to keep her on."

"Unless there's reason not to. Or is this in violation of client confidentiality?"

"Probably," said Groves. "It's a tricky line."

Contented as a cat, Lorca said, "A line you seem to have crossed already."

Groves frowned at Lorca and picked up the water again. "What's that supposed to mean?"

"Come on, Groves. You sleep with all your clients or just the ones with dead husbands?"

Groves choked on his water and started coughing. "Whoa, whoa, whoa!" he said when he was recovered enough to speak. "I'm sorry, what!?"

"Did you think I didn't know?" asked Lorca, maintaining an impressive level of calm. "Emellia was very open about sharing your bed."

Something changed on Groves' face. His eyes went wide and his mouth contorted into a smile that threatened to turn into a laugh. "I'm sorry," he said, breathless and seemingly ecstatic, "say that again?"

"I'm aware that you've been sleeping with Dr. Mischkelovitz," said Lorca, managing admirable restraint in light of Groves' rising hysteria.

Groves began to laugh. Pure, unbridled, hysterical laughter. It was higher-pitched than Lorca would have expected. "Oh my god!" he cackled. "I know I said I wasn't ethical, captain, but even I have to draw the line somewhere!" He doubled over, slapping the table with his hand. "This is—this is perfect! Computer, computer. Where's O'Malley?"

"Colonel O'Malley is in corridor 9-B." This was the corridor outside Lab 26.

"Computer! Groves to O'Malley!"

Lorca stared in complete shock as Groves violated every rule of order and the most basic manners by calling O'Malley in the middle of dinner.

"O'Malley," came the reply.

"Mac! Mac! You'll never believe what the captain just said! Okay, okay. He just suggested I was sleeping... with Mells!" Groves started laughing again.

"Right, well, that's amusing and all," said O'Malley, entirely unamused, "but I still don't care. Wait. Aren't you with the captain right now?"

"I can't even describe his face to you. He looks so angry!" reported Groves, delighted.

It was true. Lorca was positively incensed, napkin gripped in his hand and jaw tensed with anger. His eyes were filled with a dark foreboding.

"John! Knock it off! O'Malley out."

Groves continued laughing hysterically. "I'm so sorry, captain! I just, I just... It's not that I wouldn't sleep with a client, I've done that plenty of times, but you think I'd sleep with my own sister!?" He laughed again.

The revelation washed away much of the anger as Lorca put the pieces together. A mildly amused surprise rose in its place. "She's your sister?" He would never have guessed it. Not only was there no information in either of their files that indicated as much—they didn't have a shared parent listed and they were born on different planets—but they looked nothing alike. Groves was tall, brown-eyed, with medium brown hair. Mischkelovitz was short, blue-eyed, and had dark brown hair. Even their skin tones weren't very similar. There was some resemblance in the nose, and the matter of their secret little language.

"Half-sister, but, that doesn't mean it's half-okay to sleep with her. I mean, come on! But, uh, don't tell anyone she's my sister, okay? It's not exactly public knowledge, and I'd like to keep it that way. For appearance's sake."

"You appeared to be sleeping with her," Lorca pointed out.

"Don't feel bad, captain. You're not the first person to think we were. It just gets funnier every time!" Groves chuckled. He really seemed to enjoy having one-upped Lorca, even if it was in a completely useless context.

Lorca decided to skip to another line of inquiry. "Then you can tell me about her husband?"

Groves froze. "Mischka? What about him?"

There was no reason to waste any more time on Groves than was necessary. Lorca sat back and crossed his arms. "How tall was Milosz Mischkelovitz?"

"Five foot?" said Groves, sounding uncertain.

"Five foot what?"

"No, just five feet. Maybe four-eleven, if I'm being honest? What the hell does it matter. He's dead." Groves was entirely flippant about the death of his brother-in-law.

There went the time remnant ghost theory. Lorca squinted at Groves, wondering what it took to shake him. "Then, Emellia and O'Malley," Lorca suggested. There was an almost lyrical cadence to the combination of names. Given the rather tense relationship between Groves and O'Malley, Lorca was hoping the statement would break Groves' proverbial stride.

It did not. "Wow, captain, you are bad at this," said Groves. He really had no sense of decorum, or even apparently any instinct for self-preservation. "Like, tremendously. I'll put you out of your misery, because Mac does not find this as funny as I do. So, Melly's mum left Mac's dad and had an affair with my dad. Ergo, Emellia. You follow?"

Lorca followed completely. It was Groves who was failing to understand the situation. "You're dismissed," said Lorca.

"I'm not your enemy, captain. I left a very comfortable—not to mention _safe_ —position to come to a warzone, of all places, just to repay a debt I owe a dead man."

"Dismissed," repeated Lorca, the word a hiss through his teeth. "If you prefer to go to the brig, that can be arranged."

Groves did not look intimidated in the slightest. "On what charges?"

Leave it to a lawyer to think there was due process involved. Lorca smiled. "This is my ship, Groves. What I say, goes." Not technically true, but a blanket charge of insubordination would suffice under the circumstances.

At last, Groves seemed to grasp the balance of power. He grabbed his plate, went, "Thanks for dinner, captain, it's been weird," and fled with his prize.

Lorca sat unmoving for several seconds after Groves was gone. Refusing to be put off his meal by the antics of an apparent madman, he stabbed at the steak and chewed it, glowering across the empty room at an invisible point in the distance. This week just kept getting worse and worse.

Groves was definitely not ruled out as the saboteur. If anything, he had just jumped to the top of the list.

* * *

Over the course of the week, Culber organized jogging, meditation, and debate activities. It helped, but not completely. If this went on for much longer, what other activities would the ship end up with? Cooking class? Choir? Origami? They could fold and unfold the same pieces of paper endlessly as they waited for the end of time.

Someone used their fabrication ration to make a one-thousand-piece puzzle that had taken over a whole table in the mess hall. Lorca tried to decide if he should come down upon the crew like the unholy hammer of god or let them continue using the extra hours of free time most of them now had however they saw fit. "Let them be, it's harmless," was Lalana's advice. "Humans are not as good in captivity as lului. They do not find watching walls an engaging activity."

"You like staring at the walls?" asked Lorca, genuinely horrified at the prospect.

"Where you see a wall, I see many things," said Lalana. "There are better things to look at, yes, but a wall will do when there is nothing else."

Meanwhile, Stamets continued to make slow progress no matter how many impossible deadlines Lorca saddled him with. "I can't make this go faster than it's going," he said miserably. Lorca noted the cultivation bay was beginning to look like a proper forest and suspected Stamets was not working hard enough. Examination of the security footage revealed _Prototaxites stellaviatori_ grew quite quickly on its own in the right conditions.

Stamets really was doing his very best to get them out of null time and not be distracted by his grow room. He just wasn't having much success.

In the security footage, Groves turned out to be in the mess hall at the time of the sabotage. There were no phantom smudges to indicate he had anything to do with it or any sign he possessed any sort of device. Nothing turned up in the search of his quarters, either. Lorca decided to keep an eye on him anyway.

Groves was a spectacularly uninteresting man to watch. He spent most of his time in Lab 26, off to the side, totally uninvolved. When he wasn't there, he was in the mess eating, in his quarters sleeping, or shooting hoops in a storage bay with the basketball he'd used his allotted fabrication ration to make. Occasionally he would meet up with Egorova in her quarters. No secret what was happening there, though it was apparently a recent development stemming from their meeting during the current crisis.

It would have been a complete wash except watching Groves gave Lorca the chance to observe Mischkelovitz firsthand and see exactly what had so concerned Saru.

Mischkelovitz never sat still, which Lorca could appreciate. Up, down, left, right, manic to panicked, she was a walking disaster. She was constantly bouncing between half a dozen different things and talked to herself. Sometimes she seemed to be talking to her dead husband. Sometimes she just made funny noises, seemingly because she found it enjoyable. There was never any telling what she was going to do from one moment to the next.

In a temporal bubble where nothing seemed to change, having something so utterly unpredictable was an unexpected delight. It was funny, watching her work. Lorca left the feed up and running as a sort of petri dish of human instability for his own entertainment.

Lalana appeared on the feed, too. She seemed to enjoy watching Mischkelovitz as much as Lorca did. They would listen to music and talk while Groves sat doing seemingly nothing in the corner, Lalana providing her usual brand of pithy fortune cookie insights. Mischkelovitz treated these as mini-challenges to unravel.

On the subject of null time, Lalana said, "A problem is like a cloud. You cannot see the shape of it when you are standing inside it."

"But the cloud is the same shape as the ship," said Mischkelovitz, describing the spore field they were trapped in.

"Is it?"

Mischkelovitz thought about that. Then she exclaimed, "No! It isn't!" This sent her off along some sort of research tangent involving mapping the precise shape of the mycelial field with particle-level precision.

Lorca also observed a marked difference in the way Groves and O'Malley interacted with Mischkelovitz. Groves sat in constant vigilance but ignored her unless specifically directing her to do things like eat, wash, or calm down. O'Malley kept his distance and spent most of his time on guard duty outside the lab, but absolutely doted on Mischkelovitz when they were together and never seemed to do more than faintly suggest she ought maybe to go to sleep if she felt like it. Neither method, thought Lorca, was wholly effective.

The most interesting things were what happened when Mischkelovitz was totally alone. In those moments, she was entirely unencumbered by the need to be anything other than what she was. It was a rare thing to be able to observe a person with such intimacy, to see the person they truly were absent all society.

He should have turned off the feed and allowed her the privacy she thought she had, but there was something beautiful in the brokenness.

* * *

Pacing was everything. As Lorca's footsteps echoed down the corridors and sweat dripped down the side of his face, the universe was reduced to the sound of his own breath in his ears and the sensation of his feet striking the ground.

He passed a small group of joggers going the other way. They moved aside and stood at attention. He did not acknowledge them; to do so would have broken his pace. When he was past, the group turned around to run in the same direction. He was the captain. His direction was their direction, even if their little social club was not equal to the brutal pace he set for himself.

The other joggers meant it was 0700. Lorca came to a halt near the turbolift, putting a hand out against the wall and breathing heavily from the exertion. He wiped a hand across his forehead and it came away sopping wet. It had been a good run.

"Hey, Captain."

Lorca did not have to look up to recognize the voice and jocular informality belonged to Groves. He was holding his basketball and dressed accordingly. He bounced the basketball towards Lorca and Lorca caught it on sheer instinct.

"How about a little one-on-one?"

Lorca was a sweaty mess, clearly on his way to a shower, whereas Groves was newly-woken and fresh as a daisy. Lorca snapped the ball back to Groves with a glare.

"Nevermind, then," said Groves nonchalantly, and continued on.

Lorca stood a moment, frowning faintly in thought.

He made a quick pit stop in his study before heading to the storage bay where Groves had set up a makeshift basketball hoop using some spare cables and magnets. Groves was shooting three-pointers with decent accuracy and seemed pleasantly surprised to see the captain. Lorca held his hands out for the ball. Groves tossed it over.

Lorca reached behind his back, took the Reptilian blade he had stashed in the band of his running shorts, and stabbed the basketball. Groves looked momentarily pensive. Lorca dropped the deflated carcass of the ball onto the floor and walked away.

"Would you prefer squash!?" Groves shouted after him, laughing.


	54. Finger on the Trigger

"Captain's Log, stardate... same stardate as the last twenty logs. Supplemental. We've begun building the tachyon device that Mischkelovitz tells me will kill us all. At this point, it seems preferable."

Lorca paused. He was in his quarters, mostly dressed and wishing the coffee wasn't being rationed so strictly. While he could have pulled rank, it would send the wrong message to the crew and the last thing he needed was to make them more resentful of this situation than they already were.

"Computer, wipe that and start over. Captain's Log, supplemental. We are beginning work on a tachyon pulse device despite the risks, as there are few options left for us to explore. The anti-spore idea has proven to be a dead end. The transporter idea has gone nowhere, literally, and the temporal field research needs parts we don't have. In light of that, I'm willing to risk everything to get us out of here. The alternative is no future at all." The irony being that the real problem was the potential of too much future.

The door chimed. It was Landry. "Captain. The overnight disciplinary report you asked for."

"Hand-delivered. Nice touch," smirked Lorca. He scanned the report. There was another uptick in incidents. Apparently, someone was stealing pieces from the puzzle in the mess hall, and an ensign who normally worked in operations and had a reputation for being tightly-wound had freaked out at being unable to complete the puzzle for the third time.

"Do you want me to investigate the missing puzzle pieces?" asked Landry.

"I can think of a dozen better uses for your time."

"I can only think of one."

One was enough, it turned out.

In truth, it was beginning to feel vaguely unsatisfying and routine. Not that Lorca didn't try to make it interesting for both their sakes, but apparently Landry's heart wasn't totally in it this morning because she turned her head and looked out the window and said, "Does it look like there are more stars to you?"

"Really, Ellen?" asked Lorca. "Am I not doing my part here?"

Landry propped herself up on her elbows. "No, look. Between the two bright ones, there's a little star. That wasn't there before."

Lorca withdrew with a sigh. He turned to look.

He immediately abandoned Landry. Not only could he now make out more points of light, there was a faint red-orange hue in part of the sky. More stars and the trace of a familiar nebula.

He hurriedly began to dress. "Computer! Senior science staff to astrometrics!"

Landry watched him put his clothes back on with faint disbelief. "You're leaving me? Right now? Like this?"

He threw his hands up and smiled with genuinely dorky happiness. "There are stars out there! Stars!" He pulled his shoes on as he hopped out the door.

Landry stared after him, torn between annoyance and admiration. Then she smiled. No one else loved stars quite as much as Captain Lorca. And that grin on his face, she'd never seen one quite like it before. There was something bright and pure in it.

It was amazing. After this many weeks and in this situation, he could still surprise her.

* * *

Running to astrometrics had probably been unnecessary, as everyone else had chosen to walk. Saru, Egorova, Stamets, and Kumar arrived one by one and took up their usual places in the room. It was too early in the morning for Mischkelovitz, but Groves came in her place. Presumably he would fill her in later.

"Stars!" said Lorca, with his hands for emphasis.

They stared.

He tried again. "Has anybody looked out the window lately?"

"At the stars?" asked Stamets, hunching his shoulders slightly as he tended to when he couldn't believe what he was hearing.

"You mean the increasing light?" said Saru.

"Yes! There are more stars out there than there used to be!"

Egorova cleared her throat. "Sir, we're aware of the increase in photons. I didn't want to say anything until I was sure, but we don't have six hundred years. We have eight months."

"Fantastic!" said Lorca, thrilled. Eight months was insane, but doable. They would even be able to lessen most of the rationing restrictions.

Egorova blinked her eyes rapidly. He thought she meant eight months until null time ended. She shook her head. "No. We have eight months until the photon density kills us."

The change on Lorca's face seemed almost to happen in slow motion. His elation shifted into pensive disgust. "What?" he said with a sharp jerk of his head.

Egorova sighed. "So, we're in a time bubble. Photons—along with other particles—are hitting the outside of the bubble. A tiny portion of them slip through miniscule gaps in the mycelial barrier, meaning we get to see a few more stars for the time being. But the larger portion of photons stick to the barrier, both when they exit and enter. As a result, there's an entire set of photons that aren't reaching us. They're frozen in time along at the edge of the bubble. It's the photons we're not seeing that are the problem. They're thickening the barrier. As they accumulate, the holes will get smaller and the view will get darker, and the temporal barrier will become more complete."

The more Egorova spoke, the worse it sounded.

"Eventually, the density of particles will create a sort of temporal black hole." This sounded like a Groves term. Possibly pillow talk. "In a regular black hole, gravity is so strong no light can escape. This will be a hole from which no time can escape. My guess is when we hit the point of temporal singularity and our local time collapses, there'll be a brief flash of light as photons on the surface of the field are expelled by the collapse, and nobody will ever know it was us. They'll just see a photonic explosion. The resulting hole will look black, because no light will be able to escape, but it won't have a massive gravity signature. It will just be something that grabs matter and freezes it in time. Eventually, I think it'll grab enough matter to create an actual black hole. But that could take millions of years of external time."

Lorca sat with this for a long moment, chewing his lip. "Huh," he finally concluded, staring at the far wall with half-lidded eyes.

"What if we try initiating another spore jump out of here?" suggested Kumar.

"How?" asked Stamets. "I put more spores in the chamber, they're just gonna get contaminated by the spores that are there. It's like an infection, remember?" He felt certain he had explained this to Kumar already once before.

"Captain," said Saru, "we may yet have success—"

"New plan," said Lorca suddenly. "We're going to expend all of our resources. Food, power, air, everything. We'll burn it if we have to."

"Captain?" said Saru tentatively.

Lorca held up a finger. "Then, at the last moment, whatever force it is put us in this predicament is going to let us out."

Stamets, Saru, Kumar, and Egorova looked at Lorca with varying degrees of alarm. Saru's threat ganglia began to emerge.

Groves snickered. "You've lost your goddamn mind," he said, and started laughing.

Since Mischkelovitz wasn't present, Lorca decided to do something he'd been wanting to do for a very long time. He pressed the button for the comms. "Lorca to Landry. Commander, would you mind dropping by astrometrics and escorting Specialist Groves to the brig?"

"With pleasure, sir."

Egorova's eyes widened. "Sir!"

"You can't do that," said Groves. Despite the fact Lorca was finally making real on the old threat, he still didn't seem alarmed in the slightest. "I know, I know, captain does what he wants on his ship, but Starfleet regulations clearly state you need a reason to imprison me. Or else it looks really bad, like I'm right and you _have_ lost your mind."

Lorca threw his hands up and smirked. "Insubordination, insulting your captain, improper conduct in a meeting, you can take your pick!"

"Oh, come on," said Groves with a grin. "None of the above."

Landry arrived looking very pleased because this was her favorite part of her job. "Mr. Groves. You going to come quietly? Please say no."

"Make peace not war," said Groves, chuckling at his own perceived cleverness. He went with Landry without further objection. Unflappable to the last, it seemed.

Saru, Stamets, Egarova, and Kumar stood and watched Lorca for some sign that this was not as bad as it seemed.

"Sir, I know that sometimes human humor escapes me," said Saru, "so perhaps you can explain the joke about destroying our supplies?"

"No joke, Mr. Saru. Just good old human intuition. We'll get out of this, you'll see." He had decided Lalana might be right. This was a truly bizarre way to go about destroying the ship. If someone had put them in this with benign intent, someone could take them out of it if they forced that person's hand.

Saru touched a hand to his threat ganglia. He had always felt human intuition somewhat lacking.

Egorova did her best to put a kibosh on the insanity. "We still have eight months before we're at the point of no return. We might come up with better ideas. And maybe the anti-spore just needs more time."

Stamets let out a tiny groan and rubbed at his eyes. "Nothing is working! No matter what we do, the anti-spores keep falling apart! They need to have characteristics matching a spore, but it turns out when you invert everything, the spores just fall apart like confetti."

"Perhaps a more novel approach," began Saru.

For the second time, Lorca cut Saru off. Something in the way Stamets said the words triggered half an idea in Lorca's head and his eyes went wide with shock. "Lallen!" he shouted. Then, in a more modest tone: "No, not lallen... lelulallen!"

No one else in the room had any idea what he was talking about.

"Computer, access lului medical files, authorization Lorca-Charlie-Omega-5-1-7-9."

The report appeared on the floating astrometrics display. Lorca swiped through it as fast as he could, looking for the right part. Ek'Ez's report was as thorough as could be. What it lacked in technical scans it more than made up for in written detail and optics. He found the passage on lului medical treatment protocols and shook a finger at it, grinning. "Aha!"

Stamets was standing nearest Lorca and squinted at the text. "Suspension of biomimetic..." He gasped. "Yes!" He turned and looked at Lorca with something akin to happiness. "Yes! Why didn't I think of that?"

"'Cause you're not a medical doctor," said Lorca, utterly without malice. "And you don't know anything about lului."

Stamets happily threw his hands up. "I mean, I don't! Whatever that thing is! But this—captain, this could work!"

Saru also realized what Lorca was proposing. It was entirely the sort of novel solution Saru had been trying to suggest they consider before Lorca cut him off. "I'll begin gathering the materials and inform the necessary crew."

"Excellent." Though the idea had been his, Lorca looked at them in a way that made it feel like this was a shared victory. "Let's get to it."

"Sir," said Kumar. "The tachyon emitter?"

"Go ahead and finish it, but we're giving Mr. Stamets another chance."

"Thank you, captain," said Stamets, elated.

Kumar looked genuinely disappointed. Despite the group's insistence his idea was a bad one bound to doom the ship to a terrible end, he had really thought he would be able to prove them wrong.

Saru, Stamets, Egorova, and Kumar made their way out. Lorca leaned on the astrometrics console and started chuckling. Background radiation. As if. Though, it had been his idea. In a way they were both of them the key.

* * *

Arriving in his study, Lorca grabbed a fortune cookie. _You desire to discover new frontiers_ , it read.

"No shit," he said, and smiled, crunching down on the cookie as he brought up the feed in Stamets' engineering lab. The place was absolutely abuzz with frenzied excitement for the first time in weeks. As he had not eaten breakfast, Lorca grabbed another cookie after a minute.

The door chimed. It was Colonel O'Malley, looking tired and unhappy. "Captain."

"Colonel," answered Lorca in kind, and offered him the cookie.

O'Malley declined. "Please tell me you did not put John in the brig."

Lorca cracked the second cookie. "I put him right where he belongs. Surely you can see that?" Lorca was undeniably pleased with himself. Even if Groves was unperturbed by the confinement, it really felt like finally putting the man in his place. The second fortune was _Your thoughts are highly regarded._ Lorca snorted in amusement at it.

O'Malley sighed. This was the end of his shift and he was cutting into his sleep to be here having this conversation. "I don't disagree with you, but would you mind letting him out?"

"I'd mind very much," said Lorca, smirking and chewing. He dropped the fortune in the trash alongside the previous one. "Specialist Groves isn't going anywhere. My decision is final."

It took O'Malley a moment to formulate a response. "Captain. I'm not sure how much you're aware, but John and I have an agreement concerning Dr. Mischkelovitz. You have to let him out so he can fulfill his part of it."

"I don't have to do anything," said Lorca. He took a third cookie. This was a very poor substitute for an actual breakfast, but he was in too good a mood to care. _Your dearest wish will come true_. He was on a roll today.

"I will beg if I have to," said O'Malley, making his desperation clear. "Someone has to watch her during the day."

As fervently as O'Malley was trying, Lorca remained wholly unmoved and maintained his flippancy, saying, "I'll assign an ensign. If you hadn't noticed, we've got plenty of them on hand with very little to do."

"Oh no you bloody well won't," went O'Malley. "Security clearances, for starters. You really want word about Lalana getting out on the ship?"

The amusement on Lorca's face faded. That was a good point.

"Then there's the issue, it has to be someone Melly trusts, or we're going to have an absolute meltdown on our hands."

Lorca shrugged. "How about Lalana? She has clearance and she's there already. And you can't tell me Mischkelovitz doesn't trust her."

O'Malley tilted his head to the side. "You want Lalana to watch Emellia? Captain, I don't know that she has what it takes."

"You'd be surprised what she's capable of," said Lorca.

"I have no doubt, but she's an alien. They don't always pick up on the right cues, and I can't possibly get her up to speed on everything she needs to know right now. John would have to walk her through it anyway. Please, just let John out of the brig so he can do his shift. He can go back after."

Lorca shrugged. "You know, colonel, you're gonna have to get used to going without. As soon as we're back in normal space, Groves is leaving Discovery permanently." Not into the vacuum of space, as Lorca had variously threatened, but to the nearest starbase, outpost, or inhabited planet. Maybe uninhabited planet with breathable atmosphere if Lorca could find one.

O'Malley's face went white. "Captain, no, you can't. You promised me Emellia could stay, and frankly, I can't watch her twenty-four hours a day! I just—I can't!"

"Not my problem, colonel. You'll just have to make do with Lalana."

O'Malley's face fell, but he recovered quickly, displaying a sudden reserve of determination. "Captain, I more than anyone understand how particularly frustrating John is, but it is entirely unbecoming of you to let your jealousy get the better of you like this."

Lorca's eyebrows shot up. "Jealousy?" he repeated. "You think I'm jealous of your brother? An overblown windbag with no business on a starship who gets to spend the rest of his time here in the brig?" He was practically boasting with glee. "No, colonel, this is not jealousy."

"He's not my brother, and it absolutely is. You're threatened by him."

Lorca dismissed this with a smirk and a shrug. "Not even a little bit." Shooting three-pointers was not a skill Lorca had any interest in. Neither was coining pithy names or negotiating in courtrooms.

"Here's the thing, captain, you think I haven't noticed you and John both have to be the funniest man in the room, constantly proving nothing bothers you? It's like you're competing with each other. And I know what it is made him that way, so I'm very sorry for whatever it is happened to you, truly I am, but I assure you, Emellia's been through much worse, and the only person you're hurting by locking John up is her."

All trace of amusement vanished as O'Malley spoke. In its place rose a brimming resentment. Lorca said in a hoarse, threatening voice, "You have no idea what this war has cost me. Don't you dare presume to measure her grief against mine, colonel. I lost my entire command. People I've known for years, who were loyal to me, who followed me, who trusted me. People I cared about. I had to watch as my ship was destroyed. You think you know what that feels like? And you think the loss of a single man compares to all of that?"

O'Malley was calm, patient, and understanding as he said, "I wasn't referring to the war, captain. But as you mention it, I would never dare presume the weight of what happened to your ship or measure it against anything. But please, for Emellia's sake, let John out. You're better than this."

"Am I?" challenged Lorca.

"Yes. Without a doubt." O'Malley's splotchy, freckled face was openly sincere.

Lorca frowned and looked away, a faint sneer forming on his lips. After a moment it switched to a snarling frown. "Fine," he said. "Arrange the hours with Landry. And I don't see him anywhere but in that lab or in my brig. Understood?"

"I won't forget this, captain. Thank you." O'Malley stood at brief attention, which was a marked sign of respect since their ranks were equal, and left.

Lorca still had the third fortune and half a cookie in his hand. Two and a half fortune cookies did not make for a sufficient breakfast, but he no longer had an appetite. He dropped both the fortune and the cookie half into the trash.

* * *

Saru came across with O'Malley in the corridor. O'Malley was balancing three trays of food on his arms.

"Colonel," greeted Saru. "You are not eating in the mess today?"

"Not for a while it looks. Captain's made it very clear that John's not allowed there. Would you like to join us in the lab?"

"I've already eaten, but I will assist you." Saru took one of the trays.

"Much appreciated!" They continued down the corridor. Saru slowed his long strides slightly to match O'Malley's pace, but despite the almost comical height difference, O'Malley walked quickly, so it was only a slight adjustment.

O'Malley seemed a good person to talk to, as he was outside of Discovery's usual chain of command, and Saru had gotten to know him decently well in the recent weeks. "I am concerned about the captain's confinement of Mr. Groves."

"Oh, don't be," said O'Malley. "John'll be fine."

This was not precisely what Saru meant. "Do you think it reflects poorly on the captain? John is a civilian. There is much about Starfleet he doesn't understand."

O'Malley half-smiled at that. "Between you and me, John's an expert on the regulations. He just willfully ignores them. Honestly, I'm surprised he didn't end up in the brig sooner. Getting under people's skin is sort of his modus operandi."

"Then, you see no problem with the captain's decision."

O'Malley realized there was something more at play here. "Did something happen with the captain?"

Saru did not answer this question easily. "This morning, in addition to confining John, he suggested sabotaging our remaining supplies. And..."

O'Malley was patient. "You don't have to say if you don't want to."

This relieved much of the pressure Saru felt and he admitted, "He was dismissive of me."

During his time aboard the Shenzhou, Saru had always felt he lacked respect from the rest of the crew. The arrival of Michael Burnham had only served to highlight this state of affairs. From the first moment Burnham set foot on the ship, Georgiou had been almost infatuated with her. Suddenly everything was about Burnham: how brilliant Burnham was, how special, how strong and skilled. The actions they took were largely Burnham's suggestions and Burnham became the central figure of the ship to whom everyone looked for guidance.

It was no surprise when Georgiou passed over Saru for the position of first officer and chose Burnham instead, but that did not make it sting any less. It had only compounded Saru's feelings of inadequacy at the time. He knew, on some level, that he was not inadequate, but the universe seemed to be trying to convince him of the fact, and it made it hard to deny in the face of such overt evidence.

Saru still loved and respected his former captain. Georgiou was always kind and patient. But kindness and patience did not equal respect.

Joining Discovery as its first officer, Saru had not expected things to be very different, because he remained largely the same person he had always been. Changing ships did not change who he was at his core.

Yet things were different. There was only so much of that could be attributed to the position of first officer; Saru was not so arrogant as to think the respect he received was wholly his own. The fact was, crews took their cues from their captains. Lorca had shown respect for Saru from the outset and the crew had followed Lorca's lead.

Which was why it hurt so much to suddenly feel like Lorca was treating him the way Burnham had, the way Georgiou had _allowed_ Burnham to.

They were nearing the lab. "Here, come in a minute, will you?" said O'Malley as Larsson came into view. Larsson had been expecting O'Malley and opened the door for them.

The doors cycled. Mischkelovitz and Groves were within. O'Malley practically threw the food trays at them and then returned to the outer area with Saru, closing the doors for privacy.

"Right," said O'Malley, crossing his arms. "Tell me from the top what happened."

Saru explained in as much detail as he could. He went over the events of the meeting, the seemingly insane suggestion, the way Lorca had interrupted him not once but twice, and then found himself confessing that this reminded him of the way he had been treated by his former crew. O'Malley listened with patient attention, and when Saru was finished, he said:

"I think it's just been a very bad day for the captain. The combination of John being annoying, having his hopes dashed, and the whole infernal situation we're in just got the better of him. If I may, Lalana says Captain Lorca is a man who hates standing still. Despises it with every fiber of his being. This null time thing is essentially his worst nightmare come true and he's been living in it for a month now. It's amazing he hasn't cracked sooner. But you should go right now and tell him that you felt disrespected. Do it in a way that suggests you recognize the behavior is out of character. Be understanding, but not overly sympathetic. You don't want him to think you see him as weak in any way, or that he needs your sympathy. Understand what I'm saying?"

The instructions were somewhat complex, but they made a certain sense. "I should endeavor to make the captain understand I know it was a momentary mistake, and it is already forgiven."

"Ah, that's perfect!" said O'Malley. "Off you go, then."

"Thank you, colonel," said Saru as the outer doors opened.

"Any time, Saru." O'Malley smiled and the doors closed.

O'Malley stood alone in the lab's entryway. The smile vanished almost immediately. "O'Malley to Lorca."

"Go," came the response.

"Are you alone, captain?"

A pause. "Yes." There was a note of curiosity in the tone.

"Right. So, Saru's going to come to you in a minute and he's rather upset that you talked over him twice in the meeting this morning. When he walks in the door, you should immediately tell him you've been mulling over the morning's events and you feel you did him a disservice, you're just tired of being stuck in one place. You don't have to apologize, mind you, just make him think you feel badly about it."

Another pause. "What?"

"Did I stutter? Or is it the accent? It's the accent, isn't it."

"The accent doesn't help," said Lorca. "What brought this on?"

"Well, you did me a favor, captain, and I'm the sort that likes to repay them, so. Just giving you a heads up."

Yet again, a pause. "This doesn't mean Groves can stay."

"But you've got to admit, it's awfully useful doing me favors, isn't it?"

"Lorca out."

O'Malley smiled again, this time for no one's benefit but his own. He opened the inner doors. "Your food's cold," was Groves' greeting.

"Shut up, John," said O'Malley cheerfully, then noticed something was missing from his tray. "Melly, did you eat my pudding?"

* * *

When Saru arrived, Lorca greeted him with something like a confession, offering roughly the same combination of words O'Malley suggested. The Kelpien was gratified to realize how much his captain truly valued him as a result. Then Lorca let Saru speak as to the nature of the issue, similarly pleased that Saru seemed to realize it was not an intentional slight on his part, and they concluded with a handshake.

When Saru left, Lorca stood in quiet thought, staring at the faint glimmers of stars that had not been visible before. Though there was no atmosphere, the way the photons interacted with the barrier made them seem to twinkle.

He was going to get them back out there or die trying.


	55. Null Way Out

They were able to remove the spores gradually. Using Mischkelovitz's particle map, they deployed biomimetic suspensions of anti-spores exactly where the frozen spores were in targeted amounts. The gel substrate itself had no effect on the spores. The immovable particles cut through the yellow-green goo like pebbles through water, but when an anti-spore particle came into contact with a spore, there was a tiny pop of light as both were reduced to a discharge of energy and rendered safely inert. The chronitons, if that's what they were, dispersed back to whatever temporal plane of existence they had come from. Bit by bit the cloud of glowing particles in the spore chamber shrank like stars fizzling out in a darkening sky.

They were still trapped in time because according to Stamets and Egorova, they needed to reach a critical integrity point at which the field would collapse, but they would get out of here soon enough. "It's like a tree," explained Egorova. "Once the spores in the heart of the system are gone, the branches will fall down."

The field dropped down below sixty percent, then fifty. "Soon," promised Stamets.

At least they were finally able to eliminate the rationing. When Lorca announced this, the crew was so happy the ship seemed to reverberate with cheers. An impromptu celebration erupted in the mess hall. Nine hundred puzzle pieces ended up scattered across the floor, forcing Lorca to make another announcement: "This is a Starfleet vessel. We're all glad this is almost over, but I want every inch of this ship spotless in preparation for our return." Even this failed to put a damper on the festivities. People were simply too happy to be going home.

For his part, Lorca drank six cups of coffee to celebrate. It wasn't even good coffee, just an exercise in drinking as much as he liked. Now he was prowling the corridors in the middle of the night checking every corner of the ship for anything that might reflect badly on them once they reconnected with Starfleet.

It was late, but Lorca knew Lalana and Mischkelovitz would be awake. He found Allan guarding the door alone. "Where's..." Lorca gestured at the spot where O'Malley usually stood.

"Inside, sir," said Allan, authorizing door access.

The lab area was empty. Lorca glanced over the mess of components strewn everywhere that made up the general chaos in which Mischkelovitz preferred to work. That anything got done in this lab was a miracle, but she had managed the particle map.

The door to Lalana's area opened as Lorca approached. Lalana rotated her hands in pleasant greeting. "Hello Gabriel! You are up late tonight."

O'Malley and Mischkelovitz were inside on the couch. It was warm as ever and both had their uniform tunics off. O'Malley had his boots up on the table and a bottle of beer in his hand. Mischkelovitz was balled up next to him holding a cup in both hands. There was a padd on the couch beside O'Malley with a live feed of the hallway outside. "About four hours later than usual," was O'Malley's greeting.

Lalana looked up at Lorca. "Macarius and Emellia are celebrating the end of rationing with me." Rationing had affected Lalana less than anyone on the ship, so its end meant little to her, but as neither Mischkelovitz nor O'Malley partook in any of the wider festivities, this would seem to be the extent of their celebration.

Lorca squinted and frowned. If coffee was the cure for a hangover, maybe a hangover was the cure for coffee. "I believe decorum requires you offer me a drink, colonel."

O'Malley lifted an eyebrow. "Well, now, if I give you a beer, you'll owe me a favor, and I should warn you, I collect on favors."

Lorca crossed his arms and frowned. "I can make that an order."

"Can you now? What happens when a captain orders a colonel... Nothing, I think." There was that jaunty edge Lorca remembered from their first meeting. It seemed like a lifetime ago.

"You can have mine," said Mischkelovitz, stretching out her cup, which was mostly empty. Given the amount of beer still in the bottle O'Malley was holding, it was doubtful the cup had ever been full to begin with.

"Never mind," sighed Lorca, peeved.

"I will get you a beverage and I will owe the favor for you," announced Lalana, clicking her tongue at all of them and loping out into the lab to where she knew the beers were hidden.

"I suppose you're here to talk to Lalana," said O'Malley. "We've got about eight minutes left on this if you don't mind. You're welcome to have a sit." He moved the padd on the couch beside him to make room.

Lorca moved further inside to where he could see the monitor on the wall but did not sit. They were watching an old program he did not recognize. "Aren't you on shift, colonel?"

"Perks of being the boss. Case in point," said O'Malley as Lalana returned with the beer and handed it to Lorca. It was one of those retro artisanal microbrews. "Also it's Friday."

"It's Tuesday," said Lorca, twisting off the cap. It had been Tuesday for more than five weeks now.

"Not if you pretend time's passing. Though, it actually might be Thursday. I've lost track."

Lalana spun her hands some more and noted, "Calendars are entirely arbitrary and since there is no time in here, you might say it is any day you wish and not be incorrect. Provided the day is Tuesday." Lorca snorted in laughter and took a swig of the beer. It was a very clean pilsner, entirely refreshing in the warmth of Lalana's room.

"It's Saturday," said Mischkelovitz. It might have been a correction of O'Malley's estimate or simply the day she wanted to pretend it was.

"Then by all means," said Lorca, taking up a position next to the couch and remaining standing. "What are you watching?"

"It is called 'Sir Digby Chicken Caesar,'" said Lalana, hopping up onto the hammock behind the couch.

"This is roughly Emellia's favorite entertainment program of the past five hundred years," explained O'Malley. "Though I should warn you, it's... inexplicable."

"I am enjoying it very much," said Lalana. "It is highly irreverent! And sometimes things are more interesting when they are not easy to explain. Computer, resume."

It turned out not to be one continuous program, but a series of short sketches. The plot, what little of it there was, involved two drunken, delusional vagabonds in a mockery of Victorian-era gentlemen adventurers.

Mischkelovitz erupted into peals of laughter almost immediately. She cackled, gasped, and shrieked with utter delight. Lorca had seen this level of hysteria only once before, from John Groves. Lalana's enthusiastic tongue clicks were sedate in comparison, and O'Malley only occasionally chuckled and seemed to find most of his amusement not in the program itself, but in Mischkelovitz's reaction to it.

Periodically, the two featured characters would go on the run, the camera fixed on the titular vagabond's face while he provided imaginary narration and his own theme music. This was clearly Mischkelovitz's most favorite part.

Mischkelovitz continued tittering after the last sketch finished. Gasping with laughter, she repeated one of the final lines: "In a world where it's important to know who your friends are rather than who your daughter is!" She doubled over in continued hysterics.

O'Malley chuckled and hooked his arm around her shoulder. "All right, Melly, that's enough."

Mischkelovitz managed to get a handle on the giggling. "Thank you, Lalana! For letting us use your couch."

"You are always welcome in here, Emellia," said Lalana, dangling her tail down towards Mischkelovitz. Mischkelovitz responded by patting her hand against the broad end of the tail.

Empty bottle in hand, O'Malley pulled Mischkelovitz up from the couch, and tucked the padd under his arm. He pointed at Lalana. "Don't forget. You owe me one now." He smiled and sauntered out with Mischkelovitz at his side.

Lorca stood there, half-empty beer in hand, staring after them long after the door had closed.

"Gabriel?"

Lorca took another sip of the beer and glanced over at her. "Yes?"

Lalana turned and perched on the side of the hammock closest to him. Their faces were level. "I am sorry."

"For what?"

"Lieutenant Stamets and Dr. Culber, Macarius and Emellia, they are the only ones on Discovery who have been able to speak to loved ones throughout this. Most of the crew has been isolated from everyone they care about."

Lalana's tail drifted towards him, hovering near him but not touching him. Lorca took another sip. She continued, "In a few hours, everyone on this ship will be able to contact their loved ones, because their families are out there. But you cannot, and I cannot, because we have no one out there to contact. That is why I am sorry."

Lorca grimaced. It was a sobering thought. Not that a single beer was enough to get drunk on.

Lalana's hands clasped tightly together. "We are the only ones of our kind."

He lightened slightly, a smile breaking onto his face. "We're not the only ones. There are plenty of humans and plenty of lului out there."

"But none like you. And none like me." She placed her tail against the back of the hand holding the beer. "Please remember that. For all that you and I look very different, in this one way, at least, we are exactly alike."

The smile deepened. "You're entirely too sweet, Lalana."

"Am I?" she asked, withdrawing her tail and tilting her head. "Or am I selfish? Perhaps I just like looking at the stars in your eyes."

He laughed and she clicked her tongue, but there was a truth in it.

* * *

The call came. "Captain, we think the field is nearing collapse!"

Lorca made his way to the bridge and found all the stations active and occupied. Now that they were nearing the end, everyone was back to regular shifts. Saru moved from the captain's chair to the science station. Not that Lorca needed the chair. He bypassed it entirely and took up a position in front of the viewscreen.

"All right, people, look alive," he said, even though he himself looked haggard because he had still not been to bed. "Stamets! Status report."

"Field is at forty-two percent, captain."

Egorova's voice cut in. She was in the engineering lab with Stamets. "We're noticing an instability in the field. A particle variance. It's consistent with my models of field collapse."

"Forty-one percent!" announced Stamets. "Forty!" There was rising excitement in his voice.

As Lorca watched, the scattering of faint stars on the screen shifted. A thousand million tiny points of light suddenly twinkled into view and became constant. The red-orange nebula shimmered back into view.

"Field collapse!" reported Stamets, stating the obvious.

It was stunning. Lorca was breathlessly amazed at the sight. He had never seen anything so beautiful in all his life. As the crew erupted into cheers and applause behind him and audibly over the comms from the engineering lab, Lorca stared at the screen, overjoyed, not wanting to look away. He found himself laughing and his eyes watered. Not full tears, just a tiny twinge of true elation. He wiped at the dampness and straightened with a sense of pride. The stars were back. He felt at home.

He finally turned away to see the smiling, happy faces of the crew behind him. At the helm, Lieutenant Detmer was smiling with tears on her cheeks. Owosekun and Richter were clapping. Lorca looked across the bridge to Saru and gave a small nod of acknowledgement.

There was another person who deserved some recognition. "Congratulations, Mr. Stamets."

Unfortunately, this was not a compliment Stamets was destined to hear. "He's not here, captain," said Egorova. "He just ran out."

"Sir, incoming transmission!" reported Richter. "It's the USS Penfield."

Lorca stepped back so the holocomm could put the transmission in the same field of view as the stars on the viewscreen. "Put it through."

The captain of the Penfield appeared. She looked moderately perturbed. "Discovery, we just received a communications burst from you. Is everything all right?" All of their transmissions that had been caught by the temporal bubble had gone out all at once. As the nearest ship, the Penfield was first to respond.

"Captain Blanchard, we are right as rain. But it's very good to see you."

* * *

There were moments of elation across Discovery.

In sickbay, Dr. Culber watched the bridge feed with a smile that was interrupted only when Stamets burst into the room, ran over, and kissed him, too happy to care what the rest of the staff in sickbay might think about the display.

It turned out, the staff in sickbay were just as appreciative of Stamets' success. They applauded. Whatever blame anyone had felt about the spore drive's role in putting them in their unfortunate predicament was pushed aside by the relief of getting out, at least for the moment.

"I did it," said Stamets, moved by the display, but speaking only to Culber, because as much as there were people clapping, in moments like this, there was only one person who seemed to exist.

"I always knew you would," said Culber, smiling.

"I love you."

"I love you, too."

In Lab 26, Lalana watched her view fill with stars and spun her hands. She knew Lorca would be happy, and that made her happy, too. She wished she could have shared the moment with him in person, but at least they were looking at the same stars. A whole universe of stars.

In the brig, John Groves was oblivious to the change in circumstance when it happened. He only noticed some minutes later when Discovery jumped to regular warp. Shortly after, one of Landry's nameless security grunts came to escort him to Lab 26. Groves remarked that they must be out of null time, but the grunt said nothing.

It wasn't until Groves arrived at the lab that O'Malley confirmed the situation. "Yes, indeed, and if you hadn't fucked up so badly with the captain, you might've been able to see it, too."

"Pfft, like I care," said Groves.

"Have a lovely day," offered O'Malley, entirely sarcastic, and deserted Groves in the otherwise empty lab.

Groves stood there, alone and unhappy, because the truth was he did care. He cared an awful lot. He went to Lalana's door. "Hey," he said when she answered. "I've got nothing to do."

"Excellent," she said. "I will keep you company. I have nothing to do, either!"

Groves' arrival meant O'Malley was free to return to his quarters at last. Mischkelovitz was there, asleep in John Allan's bed because Allan's shift perfectly coincided with her sleeping habits. She stirred slightly when he entered. O'Malley hushed her and she settled back down at the familiar sound of his voice. He wished he could convince her to sleep in there all the time because it was reassuring to be able to see her and know everything was all right without having to crawl through any wall panels.

The Lab 26 guard shifts afforded precious little time for sleeping, but there was one other important thing O'Malley had to do. He activated the comms and was relieved when he got a response and the figure of his wife appeared in the room. She was taller than him, her skin grey with flecks of black and white, her eyes red slits. She was dressed in the same draped white gown she had been wearing when last he saw her, her raven-black hair still pulled into complex loops on her head. "Aeree! It's so good to see you again at last."

Aeree blinked at him. "We just spoke this morning," she said.

"It was morning for you, but it's been over a month for me. I know it's an imposition, love, but indulge me, will you? I'll explain what I can."

Aeree let out a soft sort of sigh. She did not always indulge him, because humans required so very many indulgences, but she did now. "Very well. You may proceed."

O'Malley was relieved. "Right, so, we encountered a temporal anomaly..."

There were many such transmissions across the ship. No one mentioned the spore drive, instead using the allowed terminology of an unspecified "temporal anomaly," but even leaving the detail of the spore drive out, it was incredible. Five weeks in less than five seconds.

* * *

Lorca left the bridge for the ready room, propelled by the sense that they were well overdue for reporting in to Starfleet Command. From his perspective, it had been more than five weeks. From Cornwell's, it was a lot of information to take in all at once.

"This is incredible," she said.

There was a lot to be impressed with. Stamets had gathered extensive, detailed data on the nuances of post-jump mycelial field collapse which he described as a "research breakthrough" furthering their understanding of mycelial jumps by leaps and bounds. Egorova's data on the mysterious temporal particles, limited though it was by the facilities on Discovery, would keep physicists occupied for years. (Lorca left out the detail that Mischkelovitz maintained these particles were definitely chronitons her husband had already discovered.) Several other scientific projects had gotten in extra weeks of work, even with by the power restrictions placed on them. They had a lot to show for their brief moment in null time.

Which did nothing to erase Cornwell's concerns over the cause of the incident. "Sabotage," she said, shaking her head. "We need to recall Discovery and conduct a full security review."

"Now hold on," said Lorca. "It's a non-issue at this point. Whatever caused this is no longer a threat, if it ever was in the first place. Discovery is more ready than ever to get out there. Let us go to the front lines where we can make a real difference instead of hanging out back here running drive tests."

Cornwell remained professionally doubtful. "Gabriel, something stuck Discovery in a time bubble and you don't know what."

It smarted, not knowing, but Lorca had moved past that in the five weeks of null time. "Doesn't matter. If it wanted to hurt us, it would have. Look, what did we get as a result of this 'sabotage?' Five weeks of extra time. Frankly, I hope the entity strikes again, because this time we won't waste all that time worrying about conserving our resources and whether or not we can escape. We can get every project on this ship five weeks further along in the blink of an eye and have the Klingons on the ropes by next Tuesday."

"You think the point of the sabotage was to give you more time?"

Lorca ground his teeth in aggravation. "I don't know. Maybe it wanted us to develop anti-spores. Maybe it was trying to help. What do you want me to say? I have no explanation."

Cornwell looked at him, concerned by his dismissiveness of the issue. "That's what worries me."

"I'm telling you, tactically, we're in the clear. It's time to put us on the front lines. We're five weeks readier than we were this morning."

He was clearly desperate to get out into the action after the null time experience. He had been itching for a fight before, trying to convince Cornwell to put Discovery closer to the action while it was still in the beginning of testing its spore drive, but now he seemed positively bloodthirsty. Cornwell shook her head. "Look, why don't we reevaluate this at Starbase..."

"Do you not trust my tactical assessment?"

The expression on his face was one of hurt. Cornwell's lips tightened into a thin line. She knew that cutting him down like that would do them both a disservice.

"How long have we known each other?" he asked.

Cornwell fixed him with a look that suggested now was not the time to play that card. "This has nothing to do with whether or not I trust your assessment—and I do. It's just, this is a lot to process, and I would rather we take precautions given the importance of Discovery's research."

Lorca leaned on his desk and looked downward in thought. When he lifted his head back up, he had a look of determination. "Then how about we get a second opinion." He hit the comms. "Mr. Saru, would you come in here please?"

On some level, Cornwell was impressed. The great Gabriel Lorca actually deferring to a second opinion? Then she realized the only reason he would ever do so was if he already knew what the second opinion was.

Saru entered, inclining his head in deference to Cornwell. "Admiral Cornwell."

"Saru, explain to the admiral the nature of our little sabotage," said Lorca, crossing his arms and turning away to look at the stars going by outside the ready room window.

"I can ask my own questions," said Cornwell, crossing her arms as well. From her end of the commline, she could plainly see Lorca had turned his back on her. "Commander Saru?"

Saru looked at her with a startled expression. "What is it you wish to know, admiral?"

"Do you think Discovery is under threat?"

"Not at present, no."

"But there's a chance someone on board is sabotaging you."

Saru pressed his fingers together. "I do not think this is the case. I admit I was skeptical of Lalana's assessment at first..."

Cornwell blinked in surprise. That was not a name she had expected to hear come up in this context.

"I have since come to agree that if someone were intending to harm Discovery, they chose a method which did not result in such. And, should this event happen again, we now understand how to escape from it. I do not believe the ship is under threat." Moreover, his threat ganglia agreed with this assessment, though he kept this detail to himself.

"A Kelpien says there's no danger," said Lorca, turning back around. "I rest my case."

"I'm still ordering you to report to Starbase 43 for a systems review," said Cornwell. "Is that clear?"

Lorca didn't bat an eye. "Of course, admiral." The transmission ended. Saru and Lorca stood in the ready room mulling over the orders.

"Captain," said Saru. "I do not find it pleasant when you use the fact I am a Kelpien to make a point in an argument."

Lorca momentarily sneered. Not at Saru, at the bad taste Cornwell's orders had left in his mouth. Towards Saru, he offered a look of earnest encouragement. "When it comes to Starfleet Command, I'm gonna use every damn card in the deck. I won't apologize for it. And I suggest, when you're captain, you do the same. You cannot give them an inch, Saru. As much as I respect Admiral Cornwell, she's an administrator. She's never been out here doing what we do. Anyone sitting back at Command is going to be three steps removed from what's really going on. They don't know what we know, they don't see what we see, and no matter how detailed we make our reports, they're never going to have the same perspective we do right here, right now, in the thick of it. So you take any advantage you have and you press it. "

Saru's eyes widened faintly. Lorca had not said _if_ but _when_. "Yes, captain."

Lorca turned back to the window and the stars outside. "No one sees what we see, Saru. That's our advantage and our curse."


	56. Baser Instincts

A/N: So, the jigsaw puzzle featured previously was not a reference to Jason Isaacs' "jigsaw" comment to IndieWire last week as I only just read this comment for the first time today, but talk about a coincidence. _Challenge bloody accepted, Mr. Isaacs._

Also, this whole fanfic gives Katrina Cornwell more benefit of doubt than the writers did because the whole "measured and reasoned" bit makes her sound like an idiot for not realizing anything sooner given her profession.

* * *

The initial jump into frozen time had occurred at 1625. By Discovery's onboard clock, it was resolved at 0740. Suddenly, 0740 became 1625 again. The resulting scheduling chaos was a real nightmare to sort out. Saru carefully set up the duty shifts in such a way that the day and night shift personnel would be back to their regular hours within two weeks' time, but until then, things were slightly awry.

Lorca, who had managed to accidentally stay up all night at precisely the right time to do so, was back to regular hours within a day. He found himself surrounded by second-shifters instead of his usual bridge crew. This was moderately frustrating. They were good crew, of course, but the shorthand developed over months of working together wasn't there and the rhythm was slightly off.

It mattered little. Under strict and explicit orders, they were proceeding to Starbase 43 at regular warp. Discovery's spore drive was not to be deployed until Starfleet could vet the system. Traveling to a starbase using normal warp was a task so simple even the fourth-stringers could have managed it without any guidance from the captain.

"This is so frustrating!" scowled Stamets when Lorca broke the news. "It wasn't my drive! How many times do I have to explain that? And we fixed the problem! It is a non-problem!"

"I agree," said Lorca. This was one of those rare moments when he and Stamets were on the same side of an opinion.

"We have so much more data now. I just want to apply it..." Instead, the Glenn was applying the data and was ahead of them again. It really seemed Discovery could not catch a break in the race between the two ships.

Lorca was genuinely sympathetic. "If I had my way, we'd be jumping right now. I've half a mind to tell them to shove their orders and jump us anyway. But Command has a point." Not, in his opinion, a good one, but a point all the same. They had been compromised and still no clue why or how.

Stamets scowled bitterly. "I guess we'll just run simulations or something. Damn it!" He kicked at a console in frustration.

"Watch it," said Lorca. "Don't take this out on my ship."

Stamets stared at Lorca petulantly. No matter how many times they slipped onto the same page, they always ended up back at odds again, too often within the space of a single conversation. It was an exhausting dance. "Right, well if there's nothing else, _sir_." The word remained an insult out of Stamets' mouth.

Lorca fixed Stamets with a stern glare and waited. As usual, after a minute, Stamets flinched and looked away. Only then did Lorca say, "That will be all, lieutenant." Stamets returned to his work.

A frown tugged at the corner of Lorca's mouth as he surveyed the engineering lab. They had the ability to travel instantly between two points of space, but sometimes it felt like it wasn't worth all the trouble it took, especially when they were still being held back from the front.

The slow progress of real science did not entirely suit Lorca.

There was one thing that made putting up with Stamets vaguely worthwhile. "Cadet Tilly!" barked Lorca, and Tilly jumped to attention. "I'd like to inspect the cultivation bay."

"Yes, sir!" She remained as eager to help as ever and hurried to supply the genetic sample required for access.

The doors opened to reveal a veritable forest of fungus. The mushrooms really had exploded in null time. Some of the specimens were so tall they looked like small trees. Clouds of spores hung in the air, a biological fog of limitless potential, enough spores to keep them jumping for months if only Starfleet would allow it.

Lorca clasped his arms behind his back. "Cadet. You were very quick to let me in here."

"As quickly as I could, sir!" Tilly beamed at him, proud to have been of such efficient service. This tiny bit of interaction had absolutely made her day.

Her day was about to be unmade. Lorca looked at her from the corner of his eye. "Did you stop to consider I could have been an impostor?"

Her face fell and her voice seemed suddenly very small. "Sir?"

Lorca fixed her with a dry, disapproving frown. "Did you stop to think?"

Tilly stared, uncertain what to do with this idea. The captain was clearly the captain, but what if he weren't the captain? This would have been a serious breach of security. Except he was the captain. Wasn't he? Clearly she should have gone through this thought process before she let him in. "No, sir."

"Security protocols exist for a reason, cadet."

Tilly bit her lip and swallowed, staring off to the side nervously. "Yes, sir," she managed, voice beginning to tremble.

Lorca started to smile. "Cadet. When the captain says jump, do you know what you say?"

She stared with wide eyes. "How high?"

"Exactly," he responded. "Or you just start jumping and hope you hit the mark." He chuckled softly.

"Yes, sir," she agreed, somewhat encouraged by the shift in tone.

Tilly waited until Lorca left the engineering lab and then exhaled with a high-pitched warble, her hands pressed to her chest. Stamets looked at her. "Cadet?" he asked. He had sort of gotten used to her weirdness over the weeks.

She turned and looked at Stamets with wide eyes. "Don't you think Captain Lorca is terrifying?"

"No," said Stamets, a little too fast and a little too forcefully.

"He scares the dickens out of me," said Tilly.

Stamets rolled his eyes at Tilly and resumed his work. Truth be told, Lorca terrified him, too, but he wasn't about to give the captain the satisfaction of admitting it. Not when there were security monitors everywhere.

* * *

They were still two hours out from the starbase. Lorca checked the security feed in Lab 26 and was surprised to find Mischkelovitz unattended by either of her brothers. Sensing a rare opportunity, he headed down with his usual enticement in hand.

Larsson and Allan were on the door. "Captain," greeted Larsson with a nod, allowing him inside. Lorca considered trying the imposter spiel on Larsson, decided the Swede was much less likely to react in a way that was amusing, and left it for the time being.

Mischkelovitz was working off to the side with her back to the door. She was hunched over a circuit board, her eyes fixed on a monitor that magnified the miniscule connections to a point they were visible to the engineer working on them.

"Mischka, status report," said Lorca. There was no reaction. He tried again. "Mischka." Still nothing.

Lorca walked towards her, skirting a half-assembled casing on the floor. "Earth to Dr. Mischkelovitz," he went, lighthearted.

Mischkelovitz did not realize he was there until his shadow fell across her table. She startled with such force she fell sideways from her work stool. Lorca reached out as she fell, but not quickly enough or far enough to grab her, and she hit the floor with a panicked gasp, eyes wide and one arm up defensively.

The panic subsided slightly when she saw it was him. "Captain!"

He squinted. "Did you not hear me?"

She seemed not to hear him still. She reached one shaky hand up behind her left ear and tapped a few times. "You startled me," she said. That much was obvious. He offered her his hand again and she took it. She was still shaking slightly as he pulled her to her feet.

Lorca squinted. There was something there under the mess of hair. He reached over and brushed the hair aside, ignoring the way Mischkelovitz flinched at his touch, revealing an implant embedded behind her ear. She drew back, touching the spot, nervous.

"Are you deaf?" he asked, genuinely surprised. Wide-eyed, she did not answer. "From birth, or an accident?" She looked away. Touchy subject.

He still had the fortune cookie in his other hand. He held it out to her. As usual, it worked. She took the cookie with a rapid, darting motion and quickly cracked it in half. She stared at the piece of paper as she chewed one of the cookie halves.

Mischkelovitz seemed unwilling or unable to read it out herself. Lorca offered his hand again and she turned the fortune over to him. "You will take a pleasant journey to a faraway place." The fortune felt wrong. Either it should have gone to John Groves minus the "pleasant" part for what Lorca intended to do with him, or it was an inaccurate description of the recent jump; again, minus the word "pleasant."

"Status update?" prompted Lorca again.

Mischkelovitz looked at the circuitry on the table. "It's, uh, fine?"

"Are you asking me or telling me?" prompted Lorca. He jabbed his thumb towards the door. "If you want, I can go out and come back in."

She laughed briefly, exactly as he intended her to, and he grinned and laughed slightly himself. She was an easy person to placate. "No, sir! Okay. So, this is a sort of disruption phase cannon designed to cause a reaction in a cloaking field, which doesn't exactly detect per se, but with a broad enough deployment, it should cause a spatial distortion where a cloaked ship is. If not disrupting the cloak, then at least making it detectible by other sensors. Now, how is this different from a broad-band phaser sweep? The range, to start, and it can be deployed absent a ship on a repeating mine..."

A minefield wasn't practical for most of the front lines, but certain installations would benefit from the technology. Provided Mischkelovitz could get it to work correctly. There was also the issue of the precise phase variances required, and if cloaks were anything like shields, they might feature adjustable frequencies that would require compensation. Thus, the rather complex circuitry designed to cycle through frequencies.

"I will need a Klingon ship to test this against in the field," she concluded. "If it even works."

All in all, it was a solid proposal, even if there was no guarantee of its efficacy, but it was rather trite. There were other people working on similar devices. Mischkelovitz's was maybe a bit more novel with the type of phase wave it emitted and the phase cycling, but Lorca felt obliged to point out this was much like half a dozen other projects going on in Starfleet right now.

"I'm just working on this when I'm stuck on the others," she admitted. "It's sort of busywork. It isn't difficult, it's just tedious."

"I didn't bring you on Discovery to do the same sort of research everyone else is doing," pointed out Lorca. It was clearly a challenge. "Maybe you should stay focused on the harder problems and try to work through them."

She shook her head. "This is better. My brain can work on the real problems while I work on this."

Lorca looked at her with a degree of healthy skepticism. That made it sound like she and her brain were separate entities. It was true that working on a different problem and returning to a hard one later with a fresh perspective was often an effective technique, so Lorca let the eccentricity slide.

There was something more important here than Mischkelovitz's self-imposed busywork. "You know, you didn't trip your words up once in all that," Lorca noted.

She blinked. "Didn't I?"

"You did not. Care to speculate why?" She was not generally a very self-aware person, but he was curious to see what she would come up with.

Mischkelovitz thought a moment, then smiled with a trace of mischief and said, "Cortune fookie."

Lorca laughed at that, not just because of the intentionality of it, but also because of how vulgar it sounded. Mischkelovitz giggled and wrinkled her nose with delight but was absent any hysterics, indicating this was probably only marginally funny to her. "Nice," said Lorca, smiling softly at her. "But probably not." His gaze and smile lingered. Mischkelovitz looked away, suddenly nervous again.

There was perfectly good reason for her to be. "Can I have a closer look at your implant?" Lorca asked. She shrank away. After a moment without reply, he went, "Never mind. Forget I asked."

"No!" she blurted. "It's okay." She remained looking away from him, but turned her head so her ear was facing him. Lorca brushed her hair aside.

It was a small, metallic surface flush with her skin with small horizontal slits. There was a utilitarian elegance to the design, but it was odd to see. Most hearing restoration devices were inside the ear, inobtrusive, not set behind the ear and covered with hair.

He brushed the hair aside further, using more fingers this time, and leaned in close. "Is it on both sides?" he whispered, as if concerned his proximity to the device made it inadvisable to speak any louder.

Her voice was almost a whisper in return. "Yes. They're different, though."

Lorca took that as an invitation, gently but firmly turning her by her chin. He ran his fingers through the hair on the other side and discovered a new configuration entirely. A small round membrane sat above a seam thinner than a human hair.

He withdrew his hand, his palm stroking her cheek faintly as he did. "Why didn't you hear me when I came in?"

Mischkelovitz hastily ran her own fingers through her hair, covering her ears and the implants entirely. "They were damaged." She did not say how, but it was a fair guess it had happened on the Edison.

"And you haven't fixed them?"

She trembled. "Mischka put them in. I made them and he put them in for me. He put them in." Her eyes watered and her jaw trembled. She was on the verge of tears.

Lorca tilted his head so he was in her eye line. "You shouldn't cover them up. You should show everyone what you were together."

She shook her head. "That's our secret," she said, and when she finally looked at Lorca again, her eyes were watery but there were no tears spilling out. "Captain? Are you going to send John away?"

"That depends. He's not really someone who belongs on a starship, is he, Mischka?"

"Please will you let him stay?"

Lorca frowned and studied Mischkelovitz carefully. She was still maintaining a status quo of almost-but-not-quite crying. His mouth twitched in thought. "I'll consider it, but a lot depends on him."

"I think he learned his lesson. John never needs to be taught anything twice."

Something about the way she said it sent a chill down Lorca's spine. The sentiment was intense and ominous and there was a brief flash of something wild in her eyes. It was so brief that when he looked for further sign of it, he found only the usual sense of unease from her uneven pupils. "I'll consider it," was all Lorca said.

* * *

Discovery arrived at Starbase 43 ahead of Cornwell and Lorca oversaw the resupply with the full intention and expectation that they would be underway shortly.

If Lorca was being fully honest in his tactical assessment, the starbase also offered the mystery saboteur further chance to escape the ship if he/she/it was still aboard Discovery. As good as Cornwell was at all things administrative and diplomatic, she had some deficits when it came to tactics. God help them if the fate of the Federation ever fell onto her shoulders. Hopefully someone else would be around to save them if it came down to it.

He was talking with the stationmaster when Cornwell finally arrived. A bit of the old Southern charm had convinced the stationmaster to throw in a bit of contraband confiscated from another vessel. Upon Cornwell's approach, the stationmaster clammed up.

Lorca remained at ease. "Admiral, a pleasure as always," he smiled, as if nothing even remotely untoward was under discussion.

"Walk with me, captain," was Cornwell's terse response. Lorca obligingly fell into step beside her, leaving the stationmaster in a state of guilty relief.

They strode around the station's main common area, which had the feel of a modest patio. "I'm very concerned about this incident," Cornwell began after a minute. "We all are."

"We?" echoed Lorca.

"I'm here on behalf the admiralty."

"And what does the admiralty want of me?" he said with lyrical dismissiveness.

This was a difficult question to answer because there were several conflicting views among high command. Some wanted to prioritize perfecting the spore drive. Some wanted to utilize Discovery's combat capability. Some wanted Lorca out of the captain's chair, and some did not. This was more politics than she knew Lorca enjoyed. "A stable spore drive," she said carefully.

"We'll head out immediately and resume testing."

Cornwell resisted the urge to groan, sigh, or otherwise break decorum. "We can't be certain Discovery's spore drive is operating correctly."

His ire was immediate. "Because you won't let me test it!" This drew looks from other personnel in the area and Cornwell glared at him in admonishment. He dropped his voice back down to a normal level. "Stamets has assured me the drive is functioning correctly. We've now added a protocol to scan for exotic particles of that type before inserting them into dispersal chamber. Kat, it won't happen again unless we want it to."

"And do you?"

"If it would please Starfleet Command to get another five months of work done in the blink of an eye, then yes. But we can't force what happened to happen again. We can only prevent it or escape it. Tell me what it is you want and we'll go with that, but damn it, Kat, get us back out there. We're losing this war."

She folded. She always did.

* * *

She did not, however, fold without seeking a second opinion.

O'Malley answered the door in an undershirt and shorts, yawning. "I'm sorry, colonel," Cornwell said, "I know you're usually asleep right now."

"Ah, I expected you'd want a chat. It's fine. Come in, admiral, please. Sorry there's nowhere really to sit properly. Quarters on this ship are abysmally cramped. I'm bunking with Major Allan."

There were better quarters, but Lorca had not assigned them to O'Malley, despite the rank equivalency. If O'Malley really cared, he could have gotten nicer accommodations, but Cornwell got the sense a bed was just a place where O'Malley slept a few hours between working.

O'Malley fixed himself a cup of tea and offered her the same. She declined. They sat on the beds facing each other. "Right, so, I've maintained scrupulous radio silence, as you suggested. I don't think he suspects, though you coming over here is something he's probably going to notice."

"Really?"

"The man is top-notch on security," said O'Malley. "Really makes use of the monitors. I mean, it's not all him, it's also that chief of his, Landry. Those two are thick as thieves. So if you think someone didn't notice when you came aboard and traced your route straight to me..."

Cornwell looked perturbed by this. O'Malley picked up on it.

"That's what you want from a man running _X_ number of top-secret experiments on his ship, isn't it?"

"Maybe," said Cornwell, unconvinced.

"Well if you tell me what your concerns are, I can address them directly." He waved a hand slightly, inviting her to say whatever she pleased.

O'Malley sipped his tea and listened as Cornwell outlined everything that presently worried her about Gabriel Lorca. It was a significant list, containing both the professional concerns of herself and Starfleet Command, and her personal concerns as someone who had known him for many years. O'Malley was a good listener. Calm, disarmingly attentive, and reflective, asking small questions for clarity and displaying sympathy. Cornwell recognized that he would have made an excellent therapist had he not chosen an entirely different line of work.

When she was done, he sat back with his tea and thought a moment. "All right. So I think what it boils down to is you're asking me if I think he's stable."

There had been several points, but that was indeed the crux of the matter. "He's different than before."

"I mean, he's been through a lot. We all have. The thing is, I never met the man before Discovery, so I can only attest to the person he is now. I wouldn't say he's unstable. He's somewhat draconian, but aside from the recent frustration which we've all been privy to these past weeks—which of course for you was a single morning—I find he maintains things quite well." He dismissed any slights against Groves because Groves was someone who had once gotten punched by opposing counsel in open court, and the judge had censured Groves rather than his attacker.

"You think he's _draconian_?" This was not a word Cornwell previously would have associated with Lorca.

"Yes. I rather think his greatest weakness is his need to be in control. Not just of situations, but of people." This was a fact Cornwell knew, but the details O'Malley supplied to clarify were entirely new: "To that end, he takes a great deal of interest in the crew personally, to the point where it's a bit overwhelming. I don't think there's a single person aboard who doesn't feel the hand of the captain upon them. It's omnipresent."

Cornwell considered that as O'Malley sipped his tea. If Lorca felt he had failed the crew of the Buran by being too easy on them, it might be his way of preventing a similar tragedy on Discovery.

"Mind you," continued O'Malley, "I don't think it's a bad thing necessarily. He really drives people to get results. No two approaches quite alike, but everyone seems to excel around him. Even if he can be a little gratuitous in his use of both carrots and sticks."

It sounded extreme to Cornwell. "Do you find him overbearing?"

"Me? I'm inured to carrots and sticks."

Cornwell touched her fingers to her lips. This was a lot to take in. "What's your overall assessment?"

She did not have to specify to what, because there was only one thing she could be referring to. O'Malley drummed his fingers along the side of his mug thoughtfully. "If you're asking if he has all the hallmarks of the captains I usually deal with, then the answer is yes, especially in that he tends to keep his own counsel. If you're asking me if that's a problem, my answer is I can't say. I'm certain plenty of captains have possessed these traits and never wound up in the room with me. I've only met the ones who have. My data set is skewed, as Emellia would say."

"That sounds a lot like a non-answer," noted Cornwell, fixing O'Malley with a disapproving look. "I didn't agree to this arrangement to get non-answers."

O'Malley sighed. "This situation is entirely outside my job description, admiral. I don't know what to tell you."

Cornwell appreciated that, but she needed more. "Do you think, if he's allowed to continue on Discovery, that we're going to regret it down the line?" she asked in a carefully measured tone.

"See, that's unfair," said O'Malley. "You're asking me to pre-judge him on whether or not he might commit a crime. I only talk to people after they have. What they do before that point, that's free will, isn't it?"

It seemed to Cornwell that O'Malley wasn't quite understanding the role she needed him to play. "Colonel, if you have a chance to prevent something, I should hope you see that as part of your job."

"I'm sorry to be blunt, admiral, but I'm not a psychic. So far as I can tell, he's unorthodox and wildly overconfident, but you told me once that his results speak for themselves. I find that to be an entirely accurate description of Captain Lorca."

She had said that some years back. Cornwell chewed her lip.

"He hasn't gone outside regulations that I've seen. I'd tell you if he had," said O'Malley. He frowned. "Permission to speak freely, admiral?"

Cornwell waved a hand in assent.

"I think you're chasing a ghost. It's clear the Buran incident changed him. Probably not for the better, but it's hard to say for certain. You keep looking for the person he was and judging him for not still being that. Would you still be that, if it had happened to you? I wouldn't."

Cornwell was adamantly sincere in her response. "I've known Gabriel Lorca for twenty years. I can't ignore that history."

"Nor should you. You're his friend. But I think that's what you asked me to do. Maybe he's not the captain he was, but he certainly seems to be the captain we need."

* * *

There was one key player in this Cornwell had yet to speak with. She made her way to Lab 26. Lalana was as pleasant as always, inviting Cornwell into the room she called her home.

"I need you to level with me," Cornwell said. The room was rather warm and Cornwell felt herself begin to sweat almost immediately. "How is he?"

Lalana hopped onto a central hammock structure and turned to face Cornwell, tail gently swaying behind her. "Are you asking as his friend or as his superior officer?"

"Whichever one gets me answers," said Cornwell.

"Then I will assume you are his friend first," said Lalana. This was not an assumption on Lalana's part; it was her way of steering Cornwell's perceptions in the direction she desired the conversation to take. "It was hard on him, being stuck in null time." Not for the first time, Cornwell wondered who had coined that phrase. "You know Gabriel Lorca is a restless sort of person. It does not suit him being in one place. But I maintain my promise to you, admiral. If there is anything you need to know, I will tell you. Gabriel has been doing an excellent job as captain. But his talents are not in standing still. Every day, we read reports of battles that have been fought, of people who have died, and if he were just allowed a little closer, he could have saved them."

" _Might_ have been able to save them," Cornwell corrected her. The result of any battle was always an unknown. There were too many variables. "You can't know that for sure."

"Gabriel Lorca is a highly efficient and accomplished captain. You know as well as I do that if he assesses himself as being able to effect a difference, then it is likely so."

This was ignoring one key blemish on Lorca's record: the Buran. Cornwell had not been intending to use the event in any capacity during her visit if she could avoid it, but then O'Malley had brought it up. Suddenly it felt unavoidable. "I know you have a lot of confidence in him, but he doesn't always win. The Buran proved that. If he risks Discovery and we lose the spore drive—"

Lalana's voice, which in Cornwell's experience rarely seemed to deviate much in its emotional tone, suddenly became loud and sharp. "Do I need to call in a favor?"

Cornwell was doubly confused by this because she had never known Lalana to act or sound in such a way and the implication seemed wrong on the surface. "I don't owe you any favors."

"You do not, but others do. Vice Admiral Cornwell, I have made myself very useful to Starfleet, and asked very little in return. All I am asking now is that you take my assessment back with you, and my assessment is that Discovery should be under the command of its captain, and its captain is Gabriel Lorca. Let him be captain."

Cornwell was shocked. The way Lalana used the words "vice admiral" sounded entirely belittling. Reading lului expressions remained an impossible task, but Cornwell got the sense there was something very dark in Lalana's words. "I'm sorry, are you threatening me?"

"Of course not," said Lalana. "Sometimes lului does not translate very well to English. I still trust in Gabriel. I think you should, too."

* * *

Cornwell brought this assessment back and felt more confident about the situation than she had before. O'Malley was right, she was slightly chasing a ghost, because she missed the Gabriel Lorca she had known before the Buran's destruction, and the man he had become since was much harder to love.

The debate raged for close to an hour before they came to a decision. Discovery would be allowed to continue as it had been. This was not the full permission Lorca wanted to do as he pleased, but it was more than some of the admirals wanted to give him.

There was more. "We think you should stay here as part of forward command," said Admiral Terral. "With Lorca out here, we need you."

That was cute. They thought she had some power over what Gabriel Lorca did. Even in her finest moments of managing him, that was a stretch.


	57. Choose Your Poison

Slight revision on chapter 54 – if you Ctrl-F "intuition" there's new detail explaining a story point that I've been told wasn't entirely clear in the first draft. Apologies! It's just an additional sentence of explanation after the dialogue; nothing else has changed.

Also, a note (rather belated) on OhMally/O'Malley: my favorite Star Trek character is Malcolm Reed, and Sulu was a childhood favorite, so the username is "Mally" for Malcolm and "Oh, my!" from George Takei. I then turned this into not one, but two names in this fanfic: Umale and O'Malley, purely as an inside joke. Now, it's your in-joke, too. (I mean, if you've read this far, you deserve to be let in on the writer's secret, ha!)

This is also why Malcolm Reed has plot relevance in this story. What can I say, when I'm devoted to a character, I'm devoted forever. Same goes for our captain.

* * *

When Cornwell rushed off after less than two hours, Lorca got the impression she was avoiding him, but when she reported back via holocomm that Discovery was being reinstated to normal operations, he thanked her for being so quick in attending to the matter.

"I didn't want to make you wait any longer than you had to," she said. "I think we were all missing the fact Discovery had five weeks in that anomaly. We didn't get five weeks to process everything like you did. Now that we have, and your systems check came back clean, it was clear we needed to allow you to resume your mission."

"Still. You ran off so quickly, we barely had a chance to catch up. I did notice you made time for Colonel O'Malley."

Thankfully, O'Malley had warned her this might happen, and supplied Cornwell with an excuse that sounded reasonable. "The colonel requested additional security personnel for Lab 26. I felt I should break the news in person that it wasn't available."

"In his quarters? I mean..." Lorca exhaled theatrically.

"Captain," warned Cornwell.

"Can you really blame me for being jealous? If you hadn't run off so quickly..."

Cornwell raised an eyebrow. Surely he was not suggesting they would have... He was, of course. The glint in his eye was entirely too familiar. There was something reassuring in that, even if it made Cornwell shake her head in earnest disapproval and cross her arms. "The colonel and I are just friends. I've met his wife." That was a meeting Cornwell would not soon forget.

The fact Cornwell would not sleep with a married man was readily apparent, but the fact O'Malley had a wife was news to Lorca. "That reminds me, my request for those personnel files?"

Cornwell shook her head. "The records were sealed, by a court order. There's nothing I can do. You'd need another court order to unseal them. It could take months."

That sounded like John Groves' doing. Lorca's face darkened with annoyance. He pushed it aside. "Well, maybe next time you'll do me the favor of sticking around a little bit longer, Kat, so you can give me that sort of news in person."

Cornwell shook her head, unable to hide her amusement. "Maybe I will."

"I'll hold you to that." The giddy smile on his face as the transmission terminated remained long after she was gone, vanishing only when the next order of business arrived in his ready room, looking mildly bleary-eyed.

"Captain," was O'Malley's greeting.

"Colonel," Lorca responded in kind. He took a fortune cookie and slid the bowl towards O'Malley in offer. "Did you have a nice time with Admiral Cornwell?"

O'Malley squinted discerningly and took a cookie but did not take the real bait. "Define nice. She woke me up in the middle of my night. Thank you, by the way, for waiting until I was actually awake to call me in. What can I do for you?"

"It's more what I can do for you," said Lorca. "Let's say I'm willing to entertain the idea of allowing Mr. Groves remain on Discovery."

"Oh, joy," said O'Malley, rolling his eyes and cracking his cookie. He liked having Groves around about as much as Lorca did.

"Maybe check the sarcasm at the door, colonel. I'm offering you a favor here," chided Lorca. He glanced at his fortune. * _Success and happiness are in your destiny_ *. He filed that away mentally as in support of the * _you make your own fortune_ * concept.

"Sorry, captain. I did not sleep well, thanks to your friend the admiral." Lorca noticed that, while Cornwell had described O'Malley as a friend, O'Malley did not seem to reciprocate the idea. O'Malley sighed. "I get precious little sleep as it is. I will however attempt to curtail my natural tendency towards acerbity, for both our sakes. So much as I can in my present, half-addled state."

Lorca chuckled. O'Malley seemed genuinely bitter about the situation. "You really did not get enough sleep." This might actually be fun.

There was no argument from O'Malley. He refocused to the topic at hand. "Sorry. John. John staying on the ship. What'll it take?" He popped the other half of his cookie in his mouth.

"I want to know everything there is to know about him and Mischkelovitz."

O'Malley swallowed the fortune cookie and quickly sucked any specks from his teeth. "No, captain, you don't. Believe me."

Being told he did not know what he wanted was insulting. Lorca was dangerously unamused by that. "Yes, colonel, I do, and this is not a negotiation." Lorca ate the remaining half of his own cookie at this point, chewing determinedly, the crunch sounding like some sort of threat.

O'Malley looked at Lorca with something approaching pity. "The most powerful weapon in your arsenal is information, and you hate that you don't have it."

This amused Lorca even less. He leaned forward on his knuckles, fortune curled in his left hand, looking at O'Malley with an expression that bordered on violence. "Cut the sermon and get to the point. So help me, if the next thing out of your mouth isn't something I want to hear..."

"I can't give you what you're asking for," said O'Malley somberly, "but I can, if you'll let me, give you the one thing you actually need. You see, your real problem with John is that you don't have any leverage, because John never gives anyone any leverage. But you don't need leverage. The secret to controlling John is much simpler. It's attention. When you show an interest in people who aren't him, he gets jealous, acts out, and becomes a complete pest. When you turn your attention towards him, he runs for the hills. You just need to show him you're interested, and he won't bother you any more."

Lorca considered O'Malley's assertion. He already knew Groves was a rampant attention-seeker. It was entirely unsubtle, the way the ethicist had inserted himself into the science meetings, chiming in at every opportunity and coining phrases. That part, at least, lined up.

The part that was giving Lorca trouble was the idea that providing attention would do anything besides reinforce Groves' behavior. Then again, Lorca had only ever given Groves attention in the context of trying to learn more about Mischkelovitz because asking Mischkelovitz anything tended to reduce her to a shivering puddle of tears. Groves himself held no interest. That, apparently, had been the crucial mistake at dinner: asking about Mischkelovitz. The inquiry had been a trigger for everything that followed. Lorca fixed O'Malley with a dubious glare. "I give him attention, and he just goes away? Really."

"I know it's counterintuitive, captain, but that's the way it is. He sees the connections other people have and so desperately wants that for himself, but because of the way he grew up, he instinctively identifies any personal attention as negative. He can't get out of his own way. It's tragic, really."

There was definitely a story in there. Lorca wondered if Lalana might be able to pry it out of one of them on his behalf. Then he decided it might be a more interesting challenge to do it himself. Crucially, he first had to make it seem like he had no interest. "In case you haven't noticed, I'm a little busy running a starship. I don't have time to babysit your brother." He used the term expressly for the purposes of pushing O'Malley's buttons.

O'Malley squinted discerningly at that. "You're joking, right?"

"Do I look like I'm joking?"

"No, but, I'm honestly surprised you'd say that. If anything, you are the most over-involved captain I've ever met. I think the words I used to describe you to Cornwell were 'an omnipresent hand.'" This was not the exact phrasing, but it captured the idea perfectly.

Lorca's head turned sharply to the side. "What?"

"She asked. Mind you, I don't think it's a bad thing. You seem to have a gift for figuring out what drives people and then providing it in spades. Whether they love or hate you, there are very few people on the ship who don't feel your spectre hovering behind them, pushing them to do whatever it is needs done. It's damn impressive."

The compliment was as genuine as it was surprising to hear. "How astute of you, colonel. You noticed this while standing in the hallway?"

"I had some help. Saru might be the only fellow on ship sleeps less than I do." O'Malley smiled and sniffed softly in appreciation. "He admires you. It's a shame most people don't seem to recognize his potential."

There was a second compliment in there, implied: that what other people did not see, Gabriel Lorca did. "Most people are idiots, I've found," Lorca said, straightening and crossing his arms with a look of self-satisfaction.

"Well, as one of the idiots, I'd like to thank you for not kicking John off Discovery."

Lorca raised an eyebrow. "I haven't said I'm going to let Groves stay."

"No, but you are, aren't you?" In fact, O'Malley suspected Lorca had decided as much before he even called O'Malley in and this entire conversation had been some sort of a test.

Lorca sighed. "You realize you now owe me a monumental favor? I should warn you. I collect on favors." There was a playful edge to it, a reminder of the moment O'Malley had said the same.

"I wouldn't have it any other way, captain," said O'Malley with a smile.

Lorca smiled back, but on his face, the expression rather looked like a cat with a fresh mouse. He tilted his head up. "What was your fortune?" O'Malley had not shared it at the time, but still had it in his hand.

"Is it really requisite I tell you? Isn't there something like birthday wishes where if you share them they don't come true?"

"They're fortunes, not wishes, Mac."

"Oh, well, if we're on a first name basis, * _Gabe_ *."

Lorca disliked the short version. "It's * _Gabriel_ *."

O'Malley lifted an eyebrow and said, "If you call me 'Macarius,' I will kill you." It was clearly a joke, but at the same time, Lorca didn't doubt it.

Lorca's face lit up with delight. "I'd like to see you try."

"So would I. It'd be quite a feat, I expect. I mean, you've got, what, thirty pounds and five inches on me? In height, that is. I more than make up for it where it counts."

Lorca laughed and smacked the desk. "My god, you love hearing yourself talk!"

"It's the accent," said O'Malley with a shrug. "It's irresistible. Even to me." (This was not actually the case, but it was O'Malley's go-to joke when being called out as a chatterbox, which happened regularly enough.) "Anyway, you never shared your fortune, so. Tit for tat?"

Lorca held the fortune up between his index and middle fingers. "Success and happiness are in my destiny." As always, he did not have to look at the fortune to remember it.

O'Malley did have to look at his to read it out. "Mine just says, 'Counting time is not so important as making time count.' I reckon you've got the better half of this one."

As usual, in this and in most other ways, Lorca did.

* * *

Saru was waiting for O'Malley inside the mess hall rather than at their usual spot by the turbolifts. "Sorry I'm late," said O'Malley. "Got held up. Thanks for waiting."

Saru noted two fortune cookies in O'Malley's hand. "You were with the captain?" Saru asked as they picked up the trays. No one at the tables or food dispensers paid the pair of them much note at this point. They had been performing this task at the same time every day for nearly two weeks now.

"Indeed. Looks like I won't need your help with these after this. He's finally going to let John out of the brig. For better and for worse."

As pleased as O'Malley was, Saru was hesitant. "Then, Emellia is staying."

O'Malley frowned at Saru sadly. "Sorry, I know you have your reservations about her."

"I simply do not think she is well," said Saru. "I am concerned as both the first officer and as her friend." Mischkelovitz had precious few of those, by her own choice.

Saru's concern was touching. "I'll let you in on a little secret, Saru. There are no 'well' humans. We're all of us screwed up in one way or another. Most of us just hide it really well and pretend we're not."

"All humans?"

"Every human I've ever met. Every so often there's someone who's really terrible at hiding it, like Emellia, or just decides, to hell with it, I'll be the person I am, like your Cadet Tilly."

"Cadet Tilly is an exceptional member of the crew, but she is very different from most humans." Saru took the second of the food trays from O'Malley.

"I heard a theory once all humans are crazy because we have a viral component to our DNA that makes us unstable, and that it's also the reason why humans are more likely to be able to reproduce with other species. We are literally walking viruses. Mind you, I don't know if it's true."

They had all the trays loaded now, plus a snack for Saru and something for Lalana. They began to make their way towards the lab. "I do not think you are a virus, or that problems of this nature are limited to humans," said Saru. "Certainly there are a variety of issues which affect Kelpiens and are very similar. I do find it strange that you would want Emellia to stay in a place where she is in danger, given that you clearly care for her. Would you not rather she were somewhere safe?"

Neither Lorca nor O'Malley had seen fit to share the exact nature of the situation with Saru. "Maybe I'm just making sure that if we die, we do it together. No better way to go."

"A better way would be for at least one person to live," maintained Saru. "That would be preferable to a Kelpien. Where one survives, there is always hope. I suppose we will have to agree to disagree on this point."

O'Malley smiled. They did that a lot.

They walked for a bit in silence. Then Saru said, "When it comes to hiding things, the captain seems to be very good at it."

"Some things, sure. Other things..." O'Malley clicked his tongue in the negative.

"Perhaps we should not discuss this here," said Saru. There was never any telling who might be watching or listening.

"Ah, let him listen if he likes. I'm not intimidated."

They arrived at the lab and Larsson opened the door. As the outer door closed, Saru said, "It is rare that people aren't intimidated by Captain Lorca."

"I can't afford to be intimidated by captains in my line of work."

"Do captains often try to bypass security checkpoints?"

O'Malley paused with his hand an inch away from the inner door controls. "You don't know what it is I actually do, do you, Saru?"

Saru tilted his head. He had always assumed O'Malley had done some sort of high-level security on par with the services he performed on Discovery before joining the ship, but the topic had never actually come up, and O'Malley's personnel file only listed the barest minimum detail about his history. "You are a member of Internal Security."

"Right, well, this isn't exactly a secret, but do keep it to yourself, will you? I'm not from the security branch, I'm from investigations. I'm an interrogator." Noting the look on Saru's face, O'Malley sniffed in amusement. "It sounds worse than it is. I don't torture people or employ 'leverage' like Captain Lorca does. It's mostly about providing a sympathetic ear. It's why I'm a colonel, incidentally. Helps captains to view me as an equal when I walk in the door."

Saru tilted his head, this time with intent rather than the previous curiosity. "Captain Lorca does not view you as an equal."

"No, but I've got to give it to him, he is good at pretending it sometimes." O'Malley hit the controls for the inside door.

Mischkelovitz and Groves were waiting. Groves let out an exclamation of eagerness for the food, but as they placed the trays down and Mischkelovitz happily broke open her fortune cookie, Saru remained focused on the preceding conversation. "Doesn't it bother you that he is only pretending?"

"I rather like that he makes the effort. He certainly doesn't have to."

"Who?" asked Groves, already digging into the food.

"None of yours," said O'Malley.

Lalana joined and they ate, conversing about various topics of general interest. O'Malley ate quickly and Saru only had a small portion of food, so they both wound up back in the outer chamber soon enough while the others continued eating at a more leisurely pace.

Saru picked up the earlier conversation right where it had left off. "I find it puzzling that you and Major Allan would leave your positions to act as door guards on Discovery."

"Well, think about it. My job was to interrogate and remove captains from command. We need more captains right now, not less. Would you want someone who does what I do puttering around Starfleet Headquarters?"

"Perhaps not," said Saru, pausing a moment in thought. Then he said, "I wish to amend that."

"Oh?"

"I think we need to ensure we have good captains now more than ever."

O'Malley smiled. It had not been a particularly good lie on his part. "Commander, you're like a goddamn unicorn," said O'Malley. "You are everything Starfleet should be."

"Thank you, colonel," said Saru, genuinely surprised. "You are an exemplary member of Starfleet yourself."

"Ha!" said O'Malley, thinking there were so many things Saru did not know. "I think you'll find that's a minority opinion. Though, one point of correction. Major Allan isn't an interrogator, he's from the security branch proper. He's actually been Mischkelovitz security detail for as long as there's been Mischkelovitzs in Starfleet. Nigh on twelve years now. He had to sign off on me getting this assignment!" O'Malley laughed faintly at the absurdity of a lower-ranking officer signing off on anything involving a superior and reached towards the outer door controls. "Anyway. Ready to rejoin society?"

"If you are," said Saru.

"No choice," said O'Malley, grinning and taking up his post outside the door.

As he strode down the hallway, Saru thought on the fact that O'Malley had saved that particular reveal for the security chamber. That tiny passage between the lab and the outside world was on a separate security subsystem from the rest of the ship's monitors. It could not be accessed without O'Malley's knowledge. That meant, unless Lorca wanted to tip his hand, conversations in there were unmonitored and anything said there had a reasonable expectation of being said in confidence.

For once, it was Saru and not Lorca who had a secret.


	58. Forward the Frontier

During their brief resupply interlude at Starbase 43, Straal's ambition propelled the Glenn by leaps and bounds and put Discovery firmly in the Glenn's dust yet again, but for once, Lorca did not tear into Stamets over their performance in the mycelial space race. Jumping around, gathering data, and refining the spore displacement process was all well and good, but Lorca had something else on his mind.

"Battle readiness," was what he said to Landry.

"One hundred percent," was her response.

They initiated not just a new set of drills for crew readiness to ensure none of the edge had been lost in null time, but also a full inventory and inspection of all photon torpedoes, a survey of the phaser couplings, and a full power systems cycle to check for faults. Kumar and his people scurried across the ship in a flurry of activity.

There was a palpable taste of foreboding in the air. Every person under Lorca's command was ready for the order they knew was coming.

Except, of course, the firmly unflappable John Groves, but that was a problem now easily dealt with.

Lorca called Groves to his ready room and was already munching on a fortune cookie when Groves entered. Before Lorca could even make the traditional offering, Groves went, "Why the hell is it so dark and mysterious in here?"

It was an obvious attempt to antagonize Lorca. Everyone on the ship knew about the photosensitivity resulting from witnessing the Buran's destruction and had long since come to terms with the fact Lorca had no intention of adjusting himself to the reality of the situation and was instead hell-bent on forcing the situation to adapt to him.

Lorca swallowed the urge to respond in kind and said calmly, "I think you know the answer to that."

Groves shrugged. "You should add curtains, go for a whole 'Wonderful Wizard of Oz' shebang. It would really drive the whole thing home, don't you think?" Groves' voice had taken on a wonderful quality of insincerity mingled with mockery and his eyes were big with a sense of manic delight. Weeks in the brig had done nothing to quell his instinct to push Lorca's buttons.

Then Groves saw the ball of brown fur on Lorca's desk next to the cookie bowl. "What is _that?_ "

"It's a tribble," said Lorca, gazing down at it with a certain degree of fondness. Discovery had taken a small shipment of them aboard from the starbase as biological research specimens. Their rapid reproduction rate made them uniquely suited to this function. Lorca had claimed one for himself because it reminded him of Lalana. He brushed his fingers across the tribble and it cooed in response.

"It looks like something a cat swallowed and barfed back up," said Groves.

Again, Lorca shoved aside the desire to provide Groves with a dose of honest vitriol and suggest he might like a return trip to the brig. He forced a smile onto his face and pushed the cookie bowl towards Groves. "You know, specialist, I don't think I've given you a fair shake. Since you'll be on Discovery for the foreseeable future, I think it's time we got to know each other. I'm curious, tell me, how'd you get your start in bioethics? That's an unusual field."

The mania lessened. Groves stared, first at the cookie bowl, then at Lorca. He tugged at the sleeve of his uniform tunic. "You called me up here for a personal chat?"

He was deflecting. That was a good sign. "There must be a story there. Someone inspire you? Some event in your childhood?"

"Not really," said Groves after a moment. It was really, truly satisfying to watch Groves clam up. The massive gap in Groves' file suddenly seemed less a mystery and more an ideal pressure point.

Lorca drummed his fingers twice against the desk. "So then, what did you want to be when you were a kid? Fireman? Police? I always wanted to see the stars myself."

There were traces of alarm in the corners of Groves' eyes. When his brow furrowed, it cast his brown eyes into shadow in the already dim room, making them appear inky black. Lorca could see the gears in Groves' head turning.

"Come on, Groves, what's the matter? These aren't hard questions. I'm trying to bury the hatchet here. Extend the olive branch." Lorca smiled with something that fell just short of sincerity.

"I'm just gonna..." Groves shook his hand in the direction of the door, shuffled back half a step, then turned around and walked out.

Thankfully O'Malley was telling the truth. Nothing would have pleased Lorca less than listening to actual childhood anecdotes from someone whose role on the ship was essentially Mischkelovitz's carry-on luggage.

Lorca pulled the bowl back across the desk towards him and took the cookie from the top of the pile. It read, "You are eager to share yourself and your possessions." It was a shame Groves had not taken the cookie. That would have been hysterically ironic.

* * *

Lorca tracked each and every battle with the Klingons on the starmap in astrometrics, charting the way the disputed areas shifted and moved. Every day the war drew a little closer, the Klingons advanced just a tiny bit more. Not so far as to pose any threat to Discovery, but the Federation was under siege and just because Discovery was not threatened directly did not mean it ought to stand idly by on the sidelines.

He had a plan. If command would not allow Discovery to go to the war, he would make the war come to them.

The first step was to move to the area of their designated drive test range closest to the front lines. The second was to jump them out of the test area using the spore drive. Not a tremendous distance, or even a totally accurate jump, just enough to put them somewhere unexpected, where they would not be noticed. Lorca treated the target coordinates as entirely routine and Stamets accepted them as such.

In fact, everyone on Discovery at this point did as he asked without much question. They had, in their own way, determined that they knew and trusted him—even if they disliked him, and many of them did. Lorca interpreted this as the ultimate display of his prowess as captain. It did not matter whether he was popular so much as whether his orders were obeyed unquestioningly.

When he told Richter to do a total communications blackout, no one batted an eye. When he gave Detmer a course and heading, she immediately complied.

Their destination had been carefully chosen by his study of the Klingon's movements. They hid themselves in the rings of a planet and waited.

"What are we doing? Are we jumping?" asked Stamets as a day went by.

"Not yet," said Lorca. "If I need you, I'll tell you."

Stamets huffed and pouted because he hated being on standby, not knowing if he was going to be called upon to act or if he could relax.

The distress call came. Lorca sprayed his eyes and beamed directly to the ready room, storming out from it like a bat out of hell. "Red alert!" he barked. Saru rose from the captain's chair as the ship's lighting cycled to red alert, indicating power systems were shifted to weapons and shields.

"Shall we respond, captain?" asked Saru.

"Not yet, number one," said Lorca, moving to Detmer's position at the helm. "Take us to a position in the rings with a direct line to the battle but keep us in the rings. We don't want them knowing we're here. Prepare to jump to warp." To the bridge at large, he commanded, "Tactical display!"

They were some distance, but near enough to have a very basic view of a Klingon ship attacking the USS Khorana. The Khorana's captain, an Andorian named Sherak, was a very direct combatant, bold and effective. He was charging the Klingons in a series of strafing runs, but the Khorana was yet another of those science vessels repurposed as military patrols. It was somewhat outclassed.

It was Rhys, not Landry, at the tactical console. Disappointing but workable. "Ready all torpedoes. Helm, are we in position?"

"Aye, sir," said Detmer.

Knowing the force of what was to come, Lorca sat down in his chair and hit the shipwide comm. "Hold tight!" This was as much warning as everyone was going to get. "Detmer, punch it!"

The Discovery went to warp so quickly the gravity generators could not fully compensate and the ship shuddered a moment. Then it dropped out of warp so suddenly the generators were again a split second behind and the whole ship was rocked by as if it had been hit by the force of its own stop.

"Fire!" shouted Lorca, jumping back out from the chair. "Evasive pattern Delta-Six!"

A full complement of torpedoes shot out towards the Klingon vessel as the Khorana completed a strafing run. Lorca had timed it perfectly. The distance between Discovery and the battle, the Khorana's tactics—Discovery's torpedoes went sailing over the top of the Khorana and lit up a row of tiny explosions along the Klingons' underside. Discovery itself went gliding between the Khorana and the Klingon vessel like a slip of paper though the bars of a cage.

"Fire all phasers!"

The phasers were molten at this distance, cutting into the Klingons' underbelly, though the targeting was a bit of a wash. Rhys was not as good at anticipating Lorca's tactics as Landry.

"Their systems are disabled!" reported Saru.

"Khorana hailing!" called out Richter.

"Take it!" shouted Lorca, the only thing he could spare the time to call out as he directed his attention to Detmer. "Full impulse!"

Captain Sherak appeared. "Discovery—"

"I suggest you get out of here!" shouted Lorca. "All power to shields!"

"Power overload in the Klingon ship!" reported Owosekun.

It was already beginning. Klingons did not flee from battle, but they equally would not allow their cloaking technology to fall into Federation hands. Both the Khorana and Discovery moved away from the Klingon vessel as quickly as they could, but not quickly enough to avoid the concussive force of the blast as the Klingon ship exploded.

The holocomm was still active. To Sherak's surprise, rather than relief at the destruction of the Klingons, Lorca looked furiously disappointed. "Damn it!" said Lorca. "Do they rig them to explode?"

"Very probably," said Sherak dryly. "Where did you come from, Discovery?"

"We were in the area," offered Lorca.

Sherak arched an eyebrow, one of his antennae quirking up in a mirror of the gesture. "Starfleet Command has been looking for you." It was a low-level, _have-you-seen-this-ship_ note in the current war alerts.

"Congratulations," said Lorca, grinning at last, entirely entertained by the idea he had caused a small commotion in Starfleet at large. "You found us. You're welcome, by the way."

"I did have it handled," said Sherak. "The Lyra will be here momentarily." The USS Lyra was the Khorana's patrol partner. They were never too far apart, but in this instance, Discovery happened to be closer.

"What's that saying you Andorians have? Make your woes your weapons?" In this context, the meaning seemed to be that Sherak should stop his bellyaching. "Seems we turned out to be an excellent weapon for you."

Sherak's mouth pulled into a small smile at that. More Federation captains could do to study the wisdom of Andoria. He was also a confident enough captain to not feel belittled by the sentiment. "Thank you, Captain Lorca."

"Any time, Captain Sherak."

* * *

Explaining their presence at the battle turned out to be a rather simple matter, particularly when Cornwell was not the one who answered Lorca's call. She might have picked up on Lorca's subterfuge. As a Vulcan, Admiral Terral was not quite as adept at this.

"Spore drive test went a little awry," said Lorca, "we ended up not quite where we thought. Seemed wise to lay low until we got our bearings."

"Were your star maps affected?" said Terral, taking the concept of unknown bearings entirely literally.

"It was more that we weren't sure if there were any Klingons around and we didn't want to advertise our position. Turns out, there were Klingons." Of course there were. Lorca had chosen that location entirely because he knew a Klingon cruiser was headed that way.

Terral's emotionless Vulcan eyes evaluated the logic of this and found no fault in it.

"While I have you, admiral, you should know. Discovery is far more than a science ship. We weren't expecting to end up in that fight, but since we did, I think we've proven we have what it takes to conduct our research and still help fight this war. You are sidelining one of your best weapons right now, and as important as our research is—and I will go to great lengths to protect our spore drive—what is the point of us even being here if we're held back from helping until it's too late?"

Terral remained outward impassive, but inwardly, he finally saw firsthand just what it was about Gabriel Lorca that made him such a fearsome captain. "I will take that under advisement," said Terral, and the transmission ended.

That, Lorca suspected, was the Vulcan equivalent of, _You're absolutely goddamn right_.

* * *

Lorca brought four fortune cookies with him, partly out of habit and partly because he was in a good mood and he knew the cookies would only sweeten the proposal he had come to make.

He should have brought five cookies. When he gave O'Malley the first cookie at the door as a sort of unspoken thanks for neutralizing Groves, Larsson looked at Lorca with an expression of confused disgust and went, "What the hell, captain!"

Lorca winced at the callout and looked at the three cookies in his hand. He had one for Mischkelovitz, one for Lalana, and one for himself. "I forgot you were on shift," offered Lorca, which was a lie. He had simply neglected to consider Larsson's feelings on the matter.

O'Malley could see Lorca doing the math and coming up short.

"Here, you can have half of mine, Einar," said O'Malley as he opened the door for Lorca.

Larsson grunted and the outer door closed before Lorca found out if Larsson accepted O'Malley's offer or not.

Mischkelovitz was, as usual, pleased as punch to see him, her face lighting up with excitement. "Claptain Clorca!" This time, rather than switch the consonants, she had managed to mash and duplicate them. Hearing her own mistake immediately dashed her enthusiasm and a look of panic appeared on her face.

Lorca snorted in amusement. "Close enough," he said, and held out a cookie.

She did not take it, instead letting out a small whine of distress, screwing up her face, and smacking her fist against her forehead repeatedly. It felt like she was backsliding.

"I don't care," he told her, gently exasperated.

"I do!"

He almost snapped at her that it really didn't matter, but he knew better than to let that instinct get the better of him. Every person on Discovery had a way they needed to be handled to ensure the best results. Stamets needed to be pushed with specific tasks and impossible deadlines because otherwise he would wander out into the weeds and be distracted by pure research, as he had been for the first twelve years of his mycelial research. Saru needed to feel he was trusted, respected, and listened to, which was easy enough because Saru was trustworthy, respectable, and meted out his words with careful consideration, meaning they were always worth paying attention to. Cadet Tilly needed her eccentricities and shortcomings challenged, because when challenged, she rose to the occasion like a true Starfleet officer.

On the other hand, Mischkelovitz needed to have her eccentricities embraced, which took a great deal of patience, coddling, and hand-holding. The reason for it was clear: no one was harder on Mischkelovitz than she was on herself and the shame she felt over her peculiarities was self-evident.

As trying as it could be to manage Mischkelovitz, Lorca was incredibly patient, and he was here to secure the payoff for his efforts these past months. "Try again if you like."

She took a deep breath, but no words came out and she had to exhale. After a smaller breath, she managed, "Captain. Captain Lorca."

"Perfect," said Lorca.

She finally took the cookie, gaze downcast. "I'm sorry."

"Mischka, it's fine," he assured her, and smiled encouragingly as he cracked his cookie. "You don't need to correct yourself with me. Honestly, your way with words is part of your charm." He popped the cookie in his mouth with a smile.

This was, of course, the most perfect thing he could have said to her. She looked up at him, wide-eyed and adoring, exactly as he wanted her to, because her loyalty was as precious a thing as could be earned and he was going to need it for everything that was to come.

"Now," he said, fixing her with a look of earnest sincerity, "I've got a special project for you. That is, if you can keep a secret."

Mischkelovitz opened her cookie, glancing only momentarily at the slip of paper inside. "Entirely." She chewed and listened intently.

"That particle map you made in null time was very impressive. You think you can do something similar for the whole mycelial network? Make us a road map of all the places we might go?"

The prospect of a new problem to solve filled her with delight. "Absolutely!"

Lorca's eyes crinkled with happiness. Her delight was entirely contagious. "But you have to keep it quiet. Stamets gets a little territorial about his drive. You'll report directly to me. Not even Saru, got it?"

She bobbed her head. "Our secret." She held up her hand with her pinky extended. Lorca sniffed with amusement, shook his head faintly, and returned the gesture, locking his pinky to hers.

"Our secret."

She held up her fortune in her other hand. _Your life will be prosperous_ , it read. It seemed to have come true already.

* * *

It was a relief to finally get into Lalana's room, pull off his tunic jacket, hand her the last cookie, and flop onto the couch. "God, what a day," he said, exhaling deeply and putting his feet up onto the coffee table. The main viewscreen stars were on her monitor as usual.

Lalana hopped up beside him on the couch, sitting a foot away from him. She extracted the fortune from her cookie intact using the filaments of her tail. "Saturdays are good days for taking care of chores," she read. "This one is nonsense."

"That should have gone to Mischka. Or someone who gives a damn about calendars," said Lorca. He still had his fortune from earlier. He offered it to her. "I'll trade you."

Lalana took it and read it aloud. "'Your first choice is always wisest to follow.' This one is also bad. That is not correct at all."

"Well, unless you want to go steal the one Mischka got," Lorca proposed. He disagreed with Lalana's assessment of the merits of his fortune, but it was only polite to keep this fact to himself inside her quarters.

Lalana's tongue clicked. "I would never steal from Emellia. She would share if I asked. She is entirely giving. I believe that is why she and Macarius avoid people. Giving so much is very hard, and it is easy to be pulled as thin as dust in space when people know how much you will give them. By staying away from people, they retain some portion of themselves."

Lorca recalled the way Mischkelovitz had yelled at Saru about food chains back in the beginning. He suspected there was more at play than just the need to avoid activating an instinct for generosity. Lalana had never seen Mischkelovitz in any interactive contexts outside of the lab and probably did not know how difficult social interactions could be for both Mischkelovitz and anyone having to deal with her who did not belong to her inner circle.

Speaking of. "You know, he hates being called Macarius."

"Only by most people. Not when I do it. Because I am so strange to most humans, they forgive me many things."

Lorca snorted. "You are very strange," he agreed.

"And you forgive it," she said.

"Only sometimes," he responded with a grin. It was true most people made plenty of allowances for aliens when it came to manners and the nuances of human culture.

Lalana slid towards him, curling up directly at his side so her back pressed against the side of his shirt. Her head turned at an almost impossible angle so it rested upon her haunch and her big green eyes looked up at him. "What about right now?"

Brushing the end of Lalana's tail just as he did the tribble, Lorca felt the familiar sensation of her epithelial filaments curling around his fingers. "I'm in a forgiving mood." Her tongue clicked lightly. Then he said, "I've done good with Mischka, haven't I?"

"Do you need me to answer or do you just wish me to tell you what you already know?"

Lorca chuckled lightly. "You know, she was a pariah before I brought her aboard. Now look at her. Flourishing. Productive." Slightly overstated, but Mischkelovitz's current situation was probably as close to either thing as she was likely ever to be for the rest of her life.

"Are you pleased for your success, or hers?" chided Lalana.

"My success is her success," said Lorca. "And Starfleet's. Which is why I'm thinking maybe Starfleet shouldn't be leaving one of its best resources languishing in a prison halfway across the quadrant."

"And what resource would that be?"

Lorca smiled. "A brilliant mind like no other. Sharp, driven, curious. The only person who saw the Klingon situation clearly at the Battle of the Binaries. Maybe if they'd listened to her, we wouldn't be losing this war."

"You mean Michael Burnham."

"One and the same."

"I still am owed a favor by Starfleet Intelligence for the work I did on Qo'noS. Would you like me to call it in?"

Lorca's eyebrows shot up. He had been intending to run through some strategies with Lalana, see what she thought might work, not have a solution offered up on a platter. He began to smile. "That would simplify things immensely," he said appreciatively.

"Then you may consider it done."

* * *

When Lorca left Lab 26, O'Malley said, "It was 'Your career plans look bright.' So tell me, if I eat half the cookie, and Einar eats the other, whose fortune is it exactly?"

"You can fight over it," suggested Lorca, heading off down the hall. Lab 26 was probably the only place on the ship more obsessed with fortune cookies than he was.

Landry was waiting outside his quarters, arms crossed and face looking even crosser. Lorca smiled at her. She did not smile back.

He disarmed her ire with his trademark Southern charm. "You know, commander, I feel just terrible that you missed all the fun today," he said, entirely lying, but entirely sincere. "How about I make it up to you?"

"That depends," said Landry, brightening from a dark pit of anger to a modest glower. "You gonna make it really worth my while?" Her dark eyes were clearly issuing him a challenge, and a smile tugged at her lips, indicating it was a challenge they would both enjoy.

There was really no better way to celebrate a victory.


	59. Ties That Bind

A/N: This chapters covers the first part of episode 3, Context is for Kings.

* * *

As Lorca looked at Mischkelovitz's mycelial map on the astrometrics display, he marveled at the beauty of it. Even incomplete, it was a truly impressive initial framework she had assembled.

But then, such assemblies were her specialty. It was no accident that she had been able to create a particle map of null time. Relative positioning was the main focus of her personal research and went to the core of the methodology she had attempted to employ to save her husband. Mischkelovitz saw the universe as a collection of infinitesimally small puzzle pieces. She could see how they fit together and extrapolate connections in a way most other people could not. To her, the main problem with the null time puzzle in the mess hall was that it only had a thousand pieces and was entirely predictable.

Mischkelovitz was standing on the other side of the display, visible through the snaking tendrils of the map as he spun and enlarged it, honing in on the areas with the most detail, zipping across the gaps. She had included color-coded projections of what might fill the gaps.

"This is damn impressive, Mischka," he said.

"It's only a start," she said. "I need more jumps in order to get enough data. But..."

"Yes?" he prompted.

"I noticed something. It's almost like..." She looked down, clasped her hands together nervously, swallowed.

"Out with it."

"It sounds crazy, but I think the network goes more places than Lieutenant Stamets thinks."

"He thinks it goes everywhere in the universe," pointed out Lorca. "That covers everything, I'm pretty sure."

She looked up, wide-eyed like a startled deer. "That's not what I mean." Lorca frowned and held his hand out expectantly for an explanation. "I think it might be able to go places outside the universe."

Lorca let that statement hang in the air a moment. Then he said, "That does sound crazy." Mischkelovitz was crestfallen to be labeled as such, but Lorca buoyed her right back up: "But crazy doesn't mean wrong."

Mischkelovitz approached the display and tweaked it with her fingers, jumping to a specific spot. "Here," she said, enlarging a small section. There were lines of glowing blue dots flowing towards a single point. "There's a point of egress right here next to where we exited on our ninth mycelial jump, but this point doesn't correspond to where it should in our rysical feality. It stands to reason this energy is exiting to someplace else."

He did not even bother correcting her at this point, and if she noticed herself make the mistake, she gave no indication. "You mean like another reality?"

She bit her lip, not quite willing to confirm this idea without more data. As exciting as this hypothesis was, she was still a good scientist and this was little more than wild speculation on her part. "Maybe?"

Lorca whistled in appreciation. "I think you might be on to something, doctor. But we'd better keep it to ourselves, because the minute we start suggesting alternate universes, they're gonna throw us in a looney bin." He chuckled, joking, but for once this was a joke that scared her more than it amused. Lorca sighed. "You just keep gathering data. When we have enough to prove you're right, they won't be able to lock either of us up."

* * *

He ordered Discovery away from the front lines under the guise of a concession to Cornwell for their momentary disobedience, but there was just as much another reason for their destination, and it was not a reason Lorca shared with anyone else.

Lalana had come through. Whoever owed her that favor must have had considerable resources at their disposal, because within days Burnham was on a transport shuttle diverted straight towards Discovery with one important obstacle in its path.

He was in his ready room tracking the shuttle's position when the bridge cut in to alert him of the distress signal. He sprayed his eyes to compensate for the light shift he was about to endure and strode out onto the bridge. "Status report!"

"It's a prison transport shuttle. The pilot is reporting an electrical mite infestation and she's become untethered from the shuttle itself."

"Do we have a lock on her?"

"EV transponder loud and clear," reported Owosekun.

"Get us in range and beam her aboard. And the shuttle?"

"It's continuing on its course. Four prisoners onboard."

"Get a tractor on it and get me the passenger manifest."

"Aye, captain."

His next command was more targeted. "Commander Landry!" he said sharply, which was as much of a summons as Landry needed to leave her tactical console and join him in his ready room. Landry cast a look at the tribble on his desk. She did not entirely approve of the creature and its frequent cooing.

"Will you look at that," said Lorca as he brought up the passenger manifest. "Michael Burnham."

"You're shitting me," said Landry, eyes widening. She could see the evidence well enough herself. Michael Burnham, the legendary mutineer of the Battle of the Binary Stars, the linchpin upon which most of the Federation blamed the war.

Lorca smiled at Landry's reaction. "Well, Federation regulations state that prisoners are to be treated with a modicum of respect, so see to it they're fed and find them a little space to sleep. We wouldn't want to be seen as inhospitable."

"Wouldn't we?" said Landry. He was talking about a group of prisoners, Burnham among them, not model citizens of the Federation deserving of their help. "You want me to tuck them in while I'm at it?"

"Sometimes I forget you're from Canada," said Lorca, amused.

"You can't believe everything they say about Canadians, sir," said Landry.

"That you're all vicious, uncivilized, blood-thirsty savages?"

Landry rolled her eyes. "Very funny," she said.

"And bring Burnham to me after they're fed. I'd like to meet our mutineer for myself."

"Yes, captain," said Landry, clearly disagreeing with this entire course of action, but there was no questioning her ability to follow orders or her personal loyalty to him.

Landry headed off to complete her assignment and Lorca summoned Saru to the ready room. The Kelpien was startled to arrive and find the face of Michael Burnham awaiting him on the display alongside the other prisoners.

"Looks like we have an unexpected guest," said Lorca. "You served with her for years. Tell me everything I need to know about Michael Burnham."

* * *

It did not take long for news of Burnham to spread across most of the ship. When the fight erupted in the mess hall, Lorca watched from his ready room with amazement on the security feeds as Burnham disabled all three of her fellow inmates with unflinching ease. It was perfect, too, how Landry waited until Burnham had finished defending herself before intervening, because anything less would have deprived him of the chance to truly see Burnham in action. It was such a good show, it was a shame he had no popcorn.

He waited for Burnham at the window, his hands resting on the windowsill, eyes fixed on the stars. He winced faintly as light filtered in when the door slid open and Burnham entered, but with his back to the door, there was no way for her to see the momentarily flash of pain on his face. He smiled at the starry view. "No matter how deep in space you are, it always feels like you can see home, don't you think?" The only answer to this question was the cooing of the tribble on his desk. "Maybe it's just me."

He could see her reflected in the window, watching him. She stood straight as a rod, and as unflinchingly, clad in a mustard yellow prison jumpsuit.

"Forgive the lighting," he said. "The lack thereof. A recent battle injury. There's nothing they can do if I want to keep my own eyes, and, I do. I have to suffer light change slowly. I like to think it makes me mysterious." He smiled at that, chuckled softly, and turned towards her at last.

She remained impassive. Not even an inkling of reciprocity at the smile he offered her.

"No?" he asked. She was even tougher than he expected. "Captain Gabriel Lorca. Welcome to Discovery."

* * *

The meeting with Burnham remained on his mind long after she was gone from his ready room. He kept going over the events in his head. It had not gone entirely as he had wanted. She was stubborn, willful, idealistic, and extremely wary of him. But Lorca had read her file, Saru was entirely forthcoming when asked, and he knew full well what drove Michael Burnham.

Michael Burnham needed problems to solve and the freedom to solve them her own way. Michael Burnham needed mysteries and challenges to overcome. She needed a purpose. She would find all this and so much more on Discovery. He poked the tribble lightly. It cooed happily in response. It was a simple creature.

"Sickbay to Captain Lorca."

Lorca could tell from the tone of Culber's voice that this was going to be an admonishment, but far be it for him to ignore the call of his chief medical officer. "Go ahead, doctor."

"Captain, are you aware that I have three Starfleet prisoners in my sickbay being treated for injuries they incurred in a fight?"

"I am now," said Lorca. Truthfully, this was not news; where else would the prisoners have been taken after that altercation?

His tone was entirely too lighthearted. Culber was terse in response. "Captain, I needn't remind you that pursuant to Starfleet penal code—"

"Then don't," said Lorca. "Save us both the wasted breath. Anything else, doctor?"

"The pilot's fine," offered Culber, annoyed that Lorca had not thought to ask.

"Then it sounds like everything's just peachy in sickbay." There was a certain degree of antipathy in this assessment.

Culber paused. "Just keeping you updated," he managed, his own distaste evident. "Sickbay out."

Lorca shook his head softly. Too many people on this ship came with walking baggage. He tapped the comms. "Lorca to Landry. Commander, let's keep Burnham isolated from our other guests. I believe there's a bed free in cadet quarters." Landry probably disagreed with this course of action as much as everything else that afforded the inmates any kindness, but she acknowledged his command without complaint.

The tribble cooed. Lorca ran his fingers through its fur. There really was something to be said for simple creatures.

* * *

It finally seemed he had everything he needed, so of course, it blew up in his face.

His only intent was to thank Lalana for her assistance with the Burnham matter. He beamed to the corridor outside the lab with a pair of fortune cookies. Allan let him in. He found Lalana sitting on the table next to one of Mischkelovitz's cloak detection devices in the main lab area. Mischkelovitz was compiling test results on a display and Groves sat off in his usual corner, feet up with a padd in hand.

"Gabriel! How lovely to see you. Has the operation completed?" Apparently Lalana had been in the main lab area or she would have seen as much on her monitor.

"Indeed it has." He held the cookie out to Lalana. She took it with her tail.

"Operation?" asked Groves.

"We rescued a few wayward travelers in distress," said Lorca, openly bragging. "Prisoners. And you'll never guess who was with them." He offered the second cookie to Mischkelovitz and she beamed happily at the gift.

"Then don't leave us in suspense, you're obviously dying to tell," said Groves sullenly, rolling his eyes at the fortune cookies. He still refused them entirely.

"Michael Burnham," said Lorca, stretching it out into two distinct moments for drama, grinning as if this were a great achievement on his part.

Mischkelovitz froze with half a cookie on her lips and let out a whimper. "Ne kol t'vassa?" she said in a small voice.

Groves put down his padd. "You're joking, right? This is one of your stupid jokes?"

Lorca frowned disapprovingly at Groves, whose jokes were altogether much stupider.

"It is not a joke," said Lalana. "Like Emellia, Michael Burnham was much reviled after the events at the Binary Stars, but also like Emellia, should she not have an opportunity to redeem herself in service of resolving this conflict? I have heard Michael Burnham is quite exceptional and I am sure Gabriel will be able to find an excellent use for her."

This was Lorca's argument almost point for point, but Mischkelovitz seemed not to hear it. She stared into the distance with vacant eyes. "Me oh'tronna," she said. "Me oh'traat vasiinen."

Groves sat up, looking alarmed. "Nai-yo vrakohl, Mischka."

Mischkelovitz's eyes seemed suddenly to refocus. She turned sharply towards Groves and started shouting at him while Lalana and Lorca stared, oblivious to what was being said. It was entirely frustrating listening to a conversation in another language, but Lorca was quite certain he caught the name "Burnham" as Mischkelovitz balled her hands into fists, crushing both halves of her cookie, and threw the crumbs to the floor. She turned and dove under her desk, opening the entrance to wherever it was she usually slept.

Groves shouted something and dove after her, managing to grab hold of her uniform. He tried to pull her out from under the desk. Mischkelovitz twisted, kicking at Groves so hard it sent his head smashing up into the corner of her desk and ripped a line of flesh from his forehead. Mischkelovitz wriggled free as Groves rolled aside, reeling from the force of the impact, and she disappeared into the wall.

Lalana hopped down from the table. "Are you all right, John?"

"What the hell just happened?" asked Lorca, looking to Groves for an explanation.

Groves tentatively touched his hand to his forehead, gasping at the sensation of raw, exposed flesh. Blood dripped onto the floor. He winced and shuddered as he carefully pressed the flap of skin back up into place. "Go get her," he hoarsely hissed at Lalana.

Lalana turned and looked at Lorca, expression as unchanging as ever, but it was easy enough to imagine a look of concerned confusion. She ducked into the wall passage in pursuit of Mischkelovitz.

Lorca stared down at Groves, utterly unsympathetic. "I'm still waiting on an explanation, specialist."

Though Groves did not respond in any language Lorca understood, the intonation of his words sounded a lot like he was telling Lorca what the captain could go do with himself. Groves pulled himself to his feet using the desk. The hand pressed to his forehead only partly staunched the flow of blood. Half of Groves' face was now dripping red.

"In _English_ ," specified Lorca.

Groves did not comply. "Saal mo prohti se'kaal beratiikannen. Ke bo'tro si kii? Je kaal'do'hol!" Even if the words were not clear, the emotion was. There was derision in there, and bitterness. Groves began to pace, muttering to himself and waving his free arm. Blood dripped from his chin to the floor, leaving a trail of dark droplets down his uniform. The drops on the floor quickly turned into bloody smudges under his feet.

Lorca suspected Groves was intentionally trying to antagonize him by not speaking English. He tried to think of a way to simultaneously neutralize Groves and get the information he needed. An impromptu interrogation into Groves' childhood seemed a little too out of left field. The brig was clearly not an effective threat. Threatening to remove him from Discovery was slightly too abstract in the moment and more likely to antagonize O'Malley and Mischkelovitz, and Lorca still needed Mischkelovitz. In particular, he needed to know Mischkelovitz had not just abandoned everything because of Michael Burnham's presence on Discovery.

There was always the threat of physical violence, but Lorca dismissed it. That was not the Starfleet way. As frustrating as it was to admit, Groves really did not let anyone have any leverage over him, which was trait Lorca could admire except for the fact he was on the wrong end of it.

It took twenty seconds for O'Malley to arrive when called. He must have used the site to site transporter into the hall. He was still in his sleepwear and his mouth fell open in shock at the sight of the blood on Groves' face. "What the hell happened!"

"He got kicked," offered Lorca. When O'Malley's eyes turned accusing, Lorca clarified, "By Mischka," and then shrugged exaggeratedly to indicate he had no clue beyond that and certainly it had nothing to do with him.

O'Malley's confusion only deepened as he attempted to get some further explanation from Groves. After two questions failed to elicit anything more than syllables of apparent nonsense, O'Malley shouted, "John, stop it, I can't understand you when you're talking _kworyaan!_ Sim—sim trell ka—" O'Malley struggled, clearly knowing a few words, but not enough to form a sentence.

This only served to enrage Groves. He stopped pacing and snarled at O'Malley, "You'll never be one of us and your mother will never love you or Emellia so just _shut up!_ "

It was a decided cruel sentiment even devoid of any context. O'Malley, to his credit, ignored it, turned to Lorca, and asked very pointedly, "Where is my sister?"

That part, Lorca knew. "She went in the wall. Lalana's with her."

O'Malley groaned faintly and shook his head. "Right. I need to get two doses of veter- vitter-toxic—"

"Vetroxican, you idiot!" said Groves. "How can you not remember that!"

O'Malley whirled on Groves and shouted at the top of his lungs, "Just because I'm not as smart as the lot of you doesn't mean I'm an idiot! Now will you _sit down_ and let me _help_ you!"

Lorca's eyes went wide in surprise and struggled to contain the smile spreading on his face because O'Malley losing his temper was utterly hilarious and this was an entirely inappropriate response to the situation. Groves, at least, was not so amused and immediately sat down in his chair. O'Malley comm'd Allan to fetch two doses of Vetroxican from sickbay, "and don't let them tell you no."

"As if they could," said Allan.

The phrasing mildly concerned Lorca. "Lorca to sickbay." Culber answered. "Please see to it Major Allan gets whatever he needs." Culber assented with a note of confusion in his voice as to why Allan was in need of anything, but Lorca had no interest in filling the doctor in.

O'Malley frowned. "That's wasn't necessary, really."

"I think it was," countered Lorca, who trusted O'Malley and Allan to adhere to proper protocols about as much as he trusted himself. (This was an entirely accurate assessment on Lorca's part.)

O'Malley went over to Groves then, tugging Groves' hand away from his head. Groves resisted the attention. Still short-tempered, O'Malley said, "Knock it off, John. Do you think I like doing this? Do you think this is what brings me happiness?"

"Then stop," said Groves bitterly. He dropped his hand away from the wound, letting the blood drip down his face. "I hate you."

"I hate you, too, but I don't let it stop me." O'Malley examined the wound. The flap of flesh was considerable, but also well-attached. Mostly it was lot of blood.

Propelled by a need to be relevant, Lorca located the medkit and brought it over. "He should go to sickbay. He could have a concussion," he advised. "It was a pretty good whack."

O'Malley snorted as he cleaned around the wound and made use of the medical tricorder's default scans to assess the situation. "Right. John, care to tell the captain why you'll never go to sickbay?" Groves glowered. O'Malley sighed. "He can't go to sickbay because if he goes to sickbay, they'll figure it out right quick his medical records are all falsified."

"Not my height and weight," said Groves.

"Yes, well, if only all medical care were based on your height and weight," said O'Malley acerbically.

Lorca leaned back against the worktable in the middle of the lab and crossed his arms. "Groves, you might be the most frustrating person I have ever met. Why would you falsify that?"

Groves smiled then, which looked truly macabre with all the blood still on his face. "'Cause, captain." This seemed to be all the explanation he was offering.

Lalana emerged from under Mischkelovitz's desk. "I do not know that I am helping Emellia. She keeps saying something about Burnham, but I do not know what."

"Burnham? As in Michael Burnham?" asked O'Malley. "Why would she be talking about her?"

Groves' smile widened into a manic grin. "Oh, you're gonna love this!"

* * *

O'Malley kicked Lorca out of the lab. He did not actually have that authority, but Lorca complied, because O'Malley seemed to be at the end of a heavily knotted rope and there was clearly nothing Lorca could do until everyone in the lab calmed down, which was not something he had any control over. His decision to bring Burnham aboard had caused a chain of events in Lab 26 that would not be easily brushed aside.

As if that weren't enough, Culber then decided Lorca needed to be questioned about the fact he had essentially ordered Culber to give two doses of Vetroxican, a _highly_ controlled neural inhibitor, to a security officer for what reason exactly?

"Dr. Mischkelovitz needed it for her research," said Lorca, the explanation so paltry he failed to convince even himself.

He could practically hear Culber's head shaking over the comm. "Captain, I understand Dr. Mischkelovitz probably doesn't deserve the reputation she has, but I have to ask, what exactly is she working on?"

"It's classified."

"Captain, if she's conducting experiments on live subjects with this drug, it's in violation of every standard of medical ethics—"

"That's enough, doctor," said Lorca sharply. "Her research has been approved by Starfleet Command and that is all you need to know."

As usual, Culber folded to Lorca's ultimate authority, but was unhappy about it. "I have a responsibility to ensure the well-being of everyone on this ship, and I take that seriously."

"Rest assured, you have no reason for concern." This lie, at least, sounded more convincing, probably because it was halfway true. There really was nothing unethical about Mischkelovitz's research.

Culber was momentarily satisfied, but Lorca was frustrated. After everything, he finally had all the pieces he wanted and needed, and they seemed to be crumbling in his fingers. Mischkelovitz had vanished into a wall, Burnham was obstinate and defensive, Stamets was still regrettably Stamets, and now Culber suspected Mischkelovitz of medical ethics violations. This was not going as intended. What was next? Saru accusing him of farming Kelpiens for emergency rations?

He really, really needed a win.


	60. Wayward Soldier

A/N: This chapter covers the remainder of episode 3, Context is for Kings. Sorry for the slightly slower post rate, but the chapters are a bit longer right now which might make up for it.

Also, major note (pun intended) – I completely misread the Memory Alpha article on major/colonel ranks and just realized they should have been swapped this whole time. So, effective immediately, it's Major Allan and Colonel O'Malley. I've already gone through and fixed this in past chapters. To quote _Colonel_ O'Malley, "This is an exceptionally bad showing on my part. I have neither defense nor excuse. Forgive me."

* * *

As he lay in bed with his husband's arms around him, Hugh Culber was not entirely comforted. There were too many question marks aboard Discovery and every day there seemed to be even more. Michael Burnham's arrival was merely the latest.

It wasn't just Burnham and the request for Vetroxican. Even before that, Culber had noticed a reluctance from the captain when it came to the welfare of the crew. It was almost like a non-issue. While Culber did his best to work around it by engaging with the crew directly and ensuring everyone was being taken care of, the lack of support from Lorca was disheartening. Even if the captain was not working directly to counter Culber's interests, it sometimes felt like it.

More worrying still were the exemptions Lorca seemed to have granted certain crew members, including himself. Lorca had agreed only to a single cursory physical at the outset. Ever since then, he deflected Culber's occasional suggestions of a follow-up with the dismissive line, "I'm fine, doctor, I'd come see you if I weren't." Since physicals were only required every six months, and technically the weeks in null time did not count towards Starfleet's regulated schedule, it was hard to press the point further.

To be fair, that initial physical had come back flawless. The captain was in excellent shape despite the physical scars of everything he had been through. Still, there were moments that worried Culber, like when Stamets reported the captain's suggestion to burn all their oxygen in null time. Stamets had described the suggestion as some sort of really bad joke no one else found very funny, but still. Some scars were less visible to the eyes and as much as Culber did not like Lorca, he wanted to be sure the captain was in good health, mentally and physically, for everyone's sake including Lorca's.

Behind him, Stamets groaned softly. "Are you sleeping?" Stamets could always tell when Culber was not.

Culber turned towards Stamets, the pale face a soft beacon in the dim, near-darkness. "I worry what this ship is doing to everyone."

Stamets eyes were closed. "You mean its captain," he said.

"Him, too."

Stamets' eyes fluttered open, a faint twist of aggravation on his face, because it was impossible to even think about Lorca without being annoyed. "You want to..."

That was Stamets' go-to solution for insomnia and frustration. There was no denying it made for good medicine. Culber hummed faintly and tilted his head, kissing Stamets' lightly. He placed a hand on Stamets' cheek. "I wish we were a world away."

"I'm sorry for dragging you here. I can't leave my _Prototaxites stellaviatori_ with that monster." Who needed children when you had a forest full of mushrooms.

"I would follow you anywhere," said Culber, smiling.

Stamets smiled then and kissed Culber more deeply. "Good, because I don't want to be anywhere you're not."

* * *

In the morning, Lorca checked the security footage and found Burnham had been unable to resist investigating the secrets of Discovery. He watched as she accessed the cultivation bay with a purloined biological sample from her assigned roommate, stepping into the mycelium forest and marveling at the enormity of it. She was interested, which was a good first step, but it was not enough. He also checked the feeds for Lab 26 and saw that neither Mischkelovitz nor O'Malley had emerged at any point, and Groves was apparently on some sort of sabbatical in his quarters. Larsson and Allan were trading off single-guard shifts.

Lorca stood in his ready room, the lights on full in an act of self-flagellation, staring glumly out the window and ruminating on how to proceed effectively. He hated the thought of waiting for any of his current problems to resolve themselves. The computer interrupted his grim reverie. "Incoming transmission," it went. "Designee: Lorca, Gabriel. Classified above Top Secret."

This was the security classification used for the spore drive project. Lorca opened the transmission. A set of files appeared onscreen. His eyes went wide.

"Saru, report to my ready room."

When Saru arrived, Lorca looked grimmer than ever, the words "Top Secret" still glaring red on his desk display. "As of 1100 hours, the USS Glenn has suffered a catastrophic failure of its spore drive."

Saru blinked, gazing at the display. According to the Glenn's transponder its position was far closer to the Klingon border than it ever should have been, the result of an ambitious long-distance jump the likes of which would have demonstrated the ability to strike Qo'noS had Starfleet Command so wished it. After months of leading in their little intership mycelial space race, the USS Glenn had finally reached the limits of its own ambitions.

"What will we do?"

Lorca brushed the transponder data aside, revealing Starfleet's orders. "We are to retrieve the Glenn's spore drive data, ascertain the nature of their malfunction, and scuttle it before the Klingons can get their hands on the technology. Assuming the Klingons aren't there already. Something tells me they probably noticed a Federation starship dropping out of the sky." In any other situation, this statement might have contained some levity to it, but Lorca was as grimly serious as he could be. "And we need to retrieve that data without risking Discovery. That means a precision strike team of the best security people we've got on this ship, and Lieutenant Stamets and some of his team."

"May I?" asked Saru, gesturing to the display. Lorca nodded. Saru began to swipe through the documents detailing the Glenn's final data burst. There were a significant number of unknowns.

"You will need more than Lieutenant Stamets, I believe. I would suggest Cadet Tilly as well. Her theoretical expertise may prove useful in determining the cause of the drive's failure."

"Good thinking," said Lorca. "We also need someone who's a quick thinker, perceptive, can handle themselves on an away mission, and still knows the science." He then frowned. "I don't think anyone in Stamets' team has those qualifications."

Saru pressed his fingers together. "Captain, if I may... I realize this suggestion may be entirely inappropriate, but I believe that there is someone aboard who meets all of those criteria, and indeed surpasses them."

"Oh?" said Lorca, raising an eyebrow.

"You expressed an interest in having Michael Burnham be useful during her brief stay on Discovery. It occurs to me that this mission is one to which Burnham is uniquely suited. She is... an exceptional resource in this regard." How many away missions had Burnham gone on with Georgiou? Nearly all of them, and very seldom did any of those missions include Saru. Burnham's bravery and martial expertise were entirely equal her intellect and exceptional Vulcan training.

Lorca looked at Saru, impressed. "Now that is entirely the sort of out of the box thinking we need," he said. "I'll have Landry assemble a security escort."

In truth, Saru had only suggested exactly what Lorca wanted him to, but still. Being led to that conclusion depended upon a certain degree of intellect, forgiveness, and command acumen on Saru's part. Saru's best quality was that, no matter what, he never disappointed. You couldn't ask for a better first officer.

The Glenn's demise was not a win, not by any metric, but maybe he could turn it into one.

* * *

With Burnham dispatched to the Glenn, Lorca found himself stuck in a holding pattern while they waited for some word from the away team. He decided to see if there wasn't some pending resolution the Lab 26 situation in the meantime. The lab was empty on the security feed, but Lalana might possess some insight into what was going on there.

Larsson was on the door. "Allan said not to let anyone in," Larsson informed him. Lorca fixed Larsson with a look so potent it could have curdled a flock of live cows and Larsson overrode the lock and let him in.

Lalana was pleased to see him, but by her own admission had nothing to offer. "I have not seen anyone since yesterday." She spent a few minutes listening to him outline Burnham's present circumstances, cheerily complimenting his handling of the situation. "You are very good to go to such lengths to help her," Lalana concluded.

When he emerged from Lalana's chambers, he found O'Malley sitting in Mischkelovitz's chair in his undershirt still, feet up and a metal cup in hand. There was an unlabeled bottle beside him of something Lorca hoped had been smuggled in, because otherwise it meant someone onboard was running an under-the-table distillery. Which, considering the sheer number of scientists on Discovery, was very likely.

To say O'Malley had not expected to see Lorca was an understatement of immense magnitude, but the expression on O'Malley's face was one of offense, not surprise.

"I don't suppose you're going to tell me where you got that?" asked Lorca, crossing his arms.

"I'm off-duty, _captain_ ," replied O'Malley, the bitterness in his voice underlining the fact he was technically outside Lorca's rank structure, even if he had nominally agreed to be subject to the captain's command while onboard Discovery.

"Not on my ship," said Lorca.

"Well then I suppose I'll just pack us all up and we'll be out of your hair. You'd like that, yes?"

Lorca took a mental step back. He uncrossed his arms, moving his hands to his hips, and looked at the floor a moment. When he looked up, all trace of indignation was gone. "How's Mischka?"

O'Malley did not answer immediately, frowning thoughtfully. Then he said sadly, "See, when you say it like that, I almost think you care."

For a long moment, neither of them said anything. Then Lorca sighed. "This may be hard for you to understand, but your sister is an important part of Discovery."

"My sister," O'Malley countered, "is an important part of _me_. Not you, not Discovery, just me. And you broke her." He took a swig of his drink.

Someone, somewhere, had broken Mischkelovitz, but it was well before Lorca met her. Judging by Groves' comment, the easy guess was her mother. "Colonel, this is conduct unbecoming on your part."

"Well, I've been climbing around in the walls thanks to you, and this is the only thing as dulls the claustrophobia, so, I think you can shove it. _Captain_." It seemed for a moment he was done, and Lorca was very well prepared to respond in kind, but then O'Malley rubbed his forehead and said, "I'm sorry. This is an exceptionally bad showing on my part. I have neither defense nor excuse. Forgive me, Captain Lorca."

Lorca snorted and started to chuckle. "As if you have a monopoly on day drinking."

O'Malley glanced up at Lorca, mildly encouraged. "This is the middle of my night, and even it weren't, I removed myself from the duty roster. I am entitled to my free time. If I choose to spend it drinking so I can crawl through walls with confidence..." O'Malley started laughing. "Sorry!"

"You are entirely drunk," observed Lorca with wry amusement, gesturing for the bottle.

"Fair enough," said O'Malley, and handed it over.

This was not a confiscation, per se. Lorca sniffed at the liquid. Just the fumes seemed capable of stripping the enamel from teeth. He took a swig. It was pure colonial moonshine-grade alcohol. "Wow," said Lorca, grinning. "This could take down a Klingon."

"Victory via exports! Worth a shot. But please be civilized." O'Malley reached behind him and passed Lorca an empty cup.

"Afraid of a few germs?" asked Lorca, but poured out a very small, measured amount into the cup.

"As half the women on this boat seem to be in love with you, I think there's a real question as to where that mouth's been."

"I'll do you the favor of pretending that was the alcohol speaking." Lorca leaned against the workbench and put the bottle next to him.

"You're setting a terrible example right now," quipped O'Malley.

"Perks of being the boss," replied Lorca, taking another sip and wincing at the sharp bite. It might not be intended for human consumption. Potentially this was an industrial solvent. Lorca lowered the cup. While he held sway over a few minds, it was hardly the stranglehold O'Malley made it out to be. "You do realize most people on Discovery hate me? They think I'm a goddamn taskmaster just because I'm trying to get things done. It's like they forget there's a war on. If I didn't keep pressing Starfleet to let us get out there and do something, I think the crew would forget entirely. Which reminds me, I need your sister's help with a few things, so if you could let me know when I can expect that?"

"My god, I can see why you're not more popular," said O'Malley, staring at his cup. Then he looked back up. "But do you really not see it? Landry, my sister, Lalana, Detmer, Owosekun, that cadet who keeps trying to get you to appoint her yeoman, the cadre of ensigns that dine to the right of the door in the mess hall, they're all in awe of you, to say nothing of the admiral."

"Oh, come on! That's ridiculous," said Lorca, incredulous. "And you're out of line, Colonel O'Malley." His tone took a sharp turn towards dangerous.

"On which count?" When Lorca's response was to frown in such a way he seemed more likely to be imagining the possibilities than denying them, O'Malley asked, "Just between us xenophiles, who's your favorite? Lalana, right?"

Lorca's eyes narrowed sharply.

"Oh, come on, I can read door and comm logs just as well as the next person. It's no mistake she's on the ship and you're in command of it."

Lorca really hated O'Malley right then. It was not a mistake in the slightest, but O'Malley was being entirely presumptuous right now, and alcohol as an excuse only went so far. He fought the urge to sneer at O'Malley and tried to switch focus away from himself. "And what about you?"

It took O'Malley a moment to process a response. "You mean my wife?" O'Malley took a swig of his drink. "She's Misellian. Do you know Misellians?"

Lorca did not, either personally or by reputation.

"Misellians don't form romantic attachments. Their mate choice is entirely pragmatic. If I died tomorrow, Aeree would simply choose another mate. So I can't die. Because while Misellians don't form romantic attachments, humans sure as hell do."

Lorca tried to refrain from commenting, but couldn't resist pointing out the obvious: "Would it really matter? You'd be dead. Little hard to care about anything at that point."

"If you think I'm going gently in the big black yonder, you've got another thing coming. I will come back and haunt you, captain." O'Malley managed to be simultaneously flippant and sincere.

Lorca looked at O'Malley with a repeat of his earlier incredulous, bovine-curdling expression. "We're on the same ship, so if I had to guess, if you die, I'm dead, too."

"Well isn't that a cheery thought," O'Malley spat. "One can only hope. I'll finally be free from the constraints of this mortal coil and the rules and regulations of Starfleet. I may be small, but I'm sure I could make you regret a few things."

Lorca snorted with disdain. There was a threat in there, to be sure. "I'm sure you could," he said, and took a sip. Since O'Malley had gotten more than a little personal, Lorca decided to return the favor. "You know, you indulge your sister a little too much. She's basically infantilized."

The hurt O'Malley displayed seemed genuine. "Oh, you think that's my fault, do you? I mean... I suppose it is a bit, but there wasn't much choice. She's like a twelve-year-old permanently."

Lorca continued his admonishment with patient calm. "I think she's older than you're giving her credit for."

"Says the man incentivizing her with cookies."

"I do a lot more than that. I also expect things of her, challenge her, and treat her like an adult as much as I can. Seems to help. You might try it sometime when you're not so busy falling over."

"You have no idea what you're talking about," said O'Malley, still hurt, with the slightest edge of panic forming. "If she shuts down on me, if she closes me out..." O'Malley gulped the rest of his drink. "She could have died at the Binary Stars." He gasped and was overcome by sudden, short breaths verging on hyperventilation. He forced himself to take deep, slow breaths. "I'm sorry, I just, I can't lose Melly. I can lose anyone else, but not her. I'd rather die."

Lorca had never seen anyone so upset by the near-death of another person. He picked up the bottle and tipped more moonshine into O'Malley's cup.

"Oh, that's very helpful," said O'Malley sarcastically, pushing the cup away. He pressed a fist to his forehead. "You wouldn't understand, but my sister, she's like the other part of me. The better part. There is no one I love more in this world. She's the most precious thing I have and I would do anything to make her happy. If you asked me to choose between her and a hundred million other people..." He did not finish this thought, but it was clear even a genocidal atrocity did not outweigh the value he placed on Mischkelovitz.

"That's..." Lorca inhaled through his teeth. "Unhealthy."

"Oh, I know. And I don't care. So I suppose you haven't got somebody that important to you? That's a shame."

Lorca's fingers tightened around the cup in his hand. "Don't presume to know me, colonel."

"No. But then, does anybody? You never talk about yourself, you deflect when you're asked questions, you pointedly refuse to share anything but what you consider to be your most brilliant insights, none of which are actually who you are. I mean, you are brilliant, but who are you in the dead of night when there's no one else around?"

Lorca said carefully, calmly, and sternly with an undercurrent of anger, "That's enough."

"Fair enough, but I can spot a defense mechanism at a hundred meters. You might say I'm an emotional sniper." That seemed to be a joke in a conversation which had lost all semblance of humor. "It's fine, really. Everyone's entitled to their secrets, captain. You more than most." O'Malley took a deep breath and stood up. "I think it's about time I got back into those walls and this is where you usually say something about having a ship to run."

Lorca put his cup down and crossed his arms, glaring at O'Malley with restrained ferocity. "I still need to know about Mischka."

"Ten to twelve hours, captain. You can ask her yourself then."

There was something reassuring in O'Malley's almost nonchalance in relaying this information. "Thank you," said Lorca tersely, and went to the door. He paused. "What is in the goddamn walls in here?"

"That's our secret," said O'Malley, smiling faintly. "You're much too big to fit through the door." It was true, and with the lab's shielding to prevent anyone accidently transporting somewhere Lalana was standing, there was no easy way around that restriction.

"I'll find out," promised Lorca.

"I wish you luck with that. You know, you're a good listener, Gabriel, even if is solely to gather exploitable intel."

Lorca looked back at O'Malley, one eyebrow raised. "And you, Mac, are one chatty alcoholic." He smiled faintly with a combination of amusement and derision and stepped out, the door sliding shut behind him.

* * *

The away team finally reported in from the USS Glenn. It was a mixed bag.

Every member of the USS Glenn's crew was dead. Not just dead, but somehow gruesomely inverted in a way that defied biology until you took into consideration biology as physics, as Stamets was fond of asserting when discussing his research. Something in their jump had gone very, very wrong.

This did not mean the Glenn was empty, as the Klingons had discovered firsthand when they attempted to board the disabled ship. In place of the crew of humans, Vulcans, Andorians, and a dozen other races united under the banner of the Federation, the Klingons encountered a monster: a bulging, hard-hided behemoth immune to phasers and birthed from the imagination of Cronenberg, its claws capable of rending the insides of a starship. It made short work of the Klingon boarding party and eviscerated Lieutenant Commander Kowski when this seemed to fail to sake its bloodlust.

Only very quick thinking on Burnham's part prevented the rest of Discovery's away team from meeting the same fate. For their troubles, they escaped with both the surviving data on the Glenn's spore drive operations—fractious and incomplete as it was—and some sort of physical drive modifications of unknown purpose which might explain the Glenn's failure as much as its success. Whatever Straal had been up to, it was going to take them some time to unravel it.

* * *

When Burnham arrived in his ready room, Lorca expected her to finally display some mark of joy or elation when he extended her an official invitation to join the crew of Discovery, but she did not. She remained every bit defiant. "You hell-bent on self-persecution?" he asked.

"That's not it," she said, shaking her head, and he could not understand why someone who had joined Starfleet and typified everything Starfleet was supposed to be would decline the opportunity to join Discovery and make right the injustice of her own imprisonment. "Not all of it, anyway."

There was no disguising the confusion on his face. He was giving everything she should want: a chance for redemption, a role, a purpose, the opportunity to make right everything that had happened at the Binaries. "Why wouldn't you stay?"

"Let me answer your question with a question. Why do you want me to stay?" He did not answer, which was telling in and of itself. Burnham's gaze was resolute as she said, "I'm not here by accident. I think you brought me here. I think you've been testing me."

"And why would I do that?" he said, but he seemed less confused by this accusation than by the idea Burnham did not want to stay in the first place.

She accused him of manufacturing biological weapons. He listened to her outline the objectionable nature of such research, forbidden as it was by Geneva protocols, and all the moral objections she had to the commission of such atrocities because of the fact that she had been a first officer in Starfleet, and despite her mutiny, in her heart, she clearly still was.

There was pride in her voice as she told him, "It is by the principles of the United Federation of Planets that I live. And by them I almost certainly die."

It was amazing how someone so perceptive could be so very, very wrong. He smiled with delight despite the accusations. "I know who you are, Michael Burnham, I know exactly who you are. I know you love being right. But I suspect that you hate being wrong even more, so let me stop you going down a path you'll regret. Computer! Two for site to site transport. Captain's ready room, engineering test bay alpha."

"Confirmed," said the computer.

"Energize," said Lorca, closing his eyes as they were enveloped by the white light of the beam. They materialized in the engineering lab. He gestured for her to enter the spore chamber. "If you'll be so kind."

There was no fear in her as he sealed the door, but the faintest bit appeared on her face when he held up the module and identified it as the mycelium spores, the very thing she had a minute ago identified as a probable biological weapon. He inserted the module into the control console. The spores drifted into the chamber with her like a dusting of glowing blue snow.

He outlined their mission: not a weapon, but a new propulsion system, built upon a microscopic web spanning the whole of the cosmos. As he spoke, the spores swirled around her, alive with excitement. "Now, if the Discovery can be anywhere and gone in an instant, that's how you beat the Klingons. That's how you win the war, and we must win the war."

There was determination in him, but also so much more. As he outlined the immense potential presented by the spore drive, something emerged onto his face which Jackson Benford would have immediately called out for what it was: the wonderment. "But that's just the beginning. Imagine the possibilities."

He could see her, slowly warming up to the idea, but the idea was nothing compared to the reality of it. He went to the controls. "Hold tight," he said, and activated the spores.

It was the same demonstration that had been given to Lalana. He rattled off the worlds as she saw them, the multitude of views so incredibly powerful, but she had been raised like a Vulcan and did not let these images overwhelm her. He snapped his fingers as the spores faded into nothing and the visions of so many possibilities fell away. "And you're home like it never happened."

He let her out of the chamber and finally he saw it. That Vulcan upbringing cracked and an expression appeared on her face that said she felt some part of the same things he did.

"So what's it to be, Michael? What's in your future?" He had brought a fortune cookie with him and offered it to her now. "You helped start a war. Don't you want to help me end it?"

She took the cookie, slowly opened it, and glanced at the paper within. "You will soon witness a miracle."

Lorca smiled. "Miracle enough for you?" he asked. "Because this ship is full of them."

* * *

As he reviewed the footage of the Glenn's destruction, ensuring all trace of it and its spore drive were obliterated from existence, Lorca experienced ambivalence. Discovery had just become twice as important in the grand scheme of things. The loss of the Glenn also removed one layer of buffer between him and Starfleet Command when it came to the mycelial drive program. Watching the Glenn explode into cloud of glowing red, he said simply, "And the USS Glenn is no more."

He was standing in one of the outer biology labs with Landry. A tribble that had not been so lucky as the one in his ready room was splayed out on a dissection tray. "Sad to see a ship like that go," said Landry.

"It's just a ship," said Lorca dismissively. "So, has our new guest settled in?"

"Aye, sir. Snug as a bug in a rug."

"Then I think we will spend some time together this evening. Thank you for beaming it aboard."

"Anything, any time, captain," said Landry.

"Dismissed." If Landry was disappointed there was no immediate reward for her services, she hid it well.

Lorca moved towards the containment pen. The forcefield was crystal clear, but beyond it lay only darkness. He put his hand onto the forcefield. It lit up blue against his touch. "Here, kitty kitty."

The monster within charged. It was the creature that had rendered so much death within the halls of the Glenn. Lorca did not so much as flinch. The field held and the monster seemed to realize the futility of its actions. It retreated back into the darkness.

Lorca withdrew from the containment pen, amazed. It was like nothing he or anyone else had ever seen before, a totally unknown creature. It resembled a sort of giant tardigrade. He went to the window and looked out at the expanse of the stars.

"You like the view?" he asked after a moment. "My favorite thing there is. No matter where you go, it's a little different, and it's always the same."

In the back of the containment pen, the monster was not enjoying the view. Lorca took the ocular spray from his pocket and treated his eyes in preparation.

"We have something in common, you know. We're both the only survivors of our ship." He turned his gaze towards the darkness. "All right now. Let's get a look at you."

He went to the controls and illuminated the containment pen. The reaction from the monster was immediate. It bucked and shook, roared like fingers being scratched through rocks, and slammed into the nearest wall.

"Guess we have something else in common." He waited a moment for the monster to tire itself slightly, then dimmed the lights. "You are vicious, aren't you. And you're out of your element." He sniffed softly. "So am I."

How beauteous this universe was, that had such marvels in it.


	61. Shock and Awe

A/N: This covers the events of episode 4, "The Butcher's Knife Cares Not for the Lamb's Cry."

I feel obliged to apologize for the slight unbelievability of the way Burnham is the key to solving so very many problems in this and all other chapters to come, but that's what happened in the show, so...

* * *

Saru was very displeased when he received the revised crew roster. "Captain, that you have done this without consulting me..."

Lorca looked at Saru with narrowed eyes and a frown that threatened to shift into a sneer. He could see value in Saru's thoughts and opinions, but that did not make them a requirement to his command and he was not in the mood to tolerate any dissension on this matter. When he spoke, he tilted his head so, even though Saru was significantly taller, it felt like Lorca was looking down his nose at the Kelpien. "This is my ship. The buck stops with me. Do you have a problem with that, number one?"

Saru glanced away, recognizing a threat even without his ganglia. "Of course not. Sir." There was steel in Saru, but even steel had a melting point. Lorca's ire was the temperature of a thousand suns. When Saru ran into Burnham in the turbolift, the mere memory of the conversation with Lorca was enough to make his ganglia writhe in an embarrassing display of discomfort.

In truth, Saru was not the one Lorca was mad at. He was mad at everyone this morning. Since the Glenn's unexpected decommission, he had been running the bridge crew through tactical simulations and the results were not good. Entirely too complacent, the lot of them. Not fast enough, not sharp enough, not experienced enough to be the knife he needed them to be. A significant portion of the crew had only ever been in one battle, the one against the Klingon cruiser with the Khorana, and that was a battle whose circumstances Lorca had so carefully engineered it was an entirely foregone conclusion. Besides, in the event things had not gone well, the Lyra had been all of five minutes away.

The spore displacement drive gave them the ability to drop in on a moment's notice, but without the Glenn as support, that meant they would be going it alone when they did.

The greatest disappointment was Landry. For all that she loved running other people though tactical simulations, she was not herself very good at them. Several times now, her failure to correctly anticipate some parameter of a given scenario had resulted in a failure.

At least Burnham's arrival provided Lorca some small distraction. As effective as she had shown herself to be crunching numbers in Stamets lab, Lorca had another project in mind for her. He set her the task of finding some use for the Glenn's monster. Anything that could rip through a Klingon boarding party like that creature surely had the potential for more practical applications. Solid state weapons that could rend starships, for example. The Klingons had used their flagship as a battering ram at the Battle of the Binaries, maybe the Federation could do something similar and retrofit some sort of ram onto their ships like the navies of old.

While Burnham settled in to that task, Lorca returned to running tactical simulations.

When Landry failed to properly account for the explosive gases in a nebula simulation, Lorca decided enough was enough and pulled her into the ready room.

"Commander Landry," he said, the sneer he had held back with Saru fully emerging. "This is not the sort of performance I expect from you of all people, and if you think I'm going to coddle you just because we share a bed..."

To her credit, Landry stood firmly at attention, her gaze unwavering, no trace of the immense betrayal she must be feeling in the moment.

Lorca could feel himself losing his temper and pulled himself back with a deep breath, closing his eyes and pressing his fingers to the bridge of his nose. Landry knew better than to try to speak up in her own defense without being invited to do so. She stood stone-still and waited.

Landry was, despite the present performance issues, good at the hand-to-hand and ground combat aspects of her job. The problem was she came up short in the one area he happened to need right now. She was more of a glorified prison warden than a brilliant strategic mind.

When Lorca finally spoke, he sounded entirely reasoned. The important thing, he knew, was to make the best of the pieces you had, not to wish you could trade those pieces for others. He did not have that luxury even if he had wanted it. "You did well retrieving that stowaway from the Glenn," he told her. "Let's put your talents to use where they'll be more effective. I've assigned Burnham to figure out a way to weaponize that thing's biology. Armor that's resistant to phaser fire, knives capable of cutting through a ship's hull, maybe even on a larger scale. Whatever that thing is made of, I want to know how we can use it and make it ourselves."

"Sir."

It was not an acknowledgment or an indication of acceptance on her part. He could see hesitation in her eyes and posture. He crossed his arms. "Something to say?"

In addition to her hesitation, there was something in her eyes that said the worst part of it all was that she knew and understood how much she had disappointed him, which was the last thing she had ever wanted to do. "I'm not sure what value I can add. I'm no scientist." She not only wasn't a scientist, she had a healthy disdain for the scientists on board, and frequently referred to them as eggheads.

"You can help Burnham understand what people like us actually need," Lorca said. "Winning wars isn't just about who has the biggest gun, Ellen. It's about who uses their gun the best. That creature down there, it doesn't even have a gun, but it took out Kowski and who knows how many Klingons. Consider this an opportunity to prove you can apply your knowledge and expertise a little more creatively."

Hearing the explanation, she seemed to get it. She was being punished, yes, but it was equally an opportunity to redeem herself in the captain's eyes. She nodded with determination. "Aye, captain."

"And commander?" He let her wait just a moment, let the anticipation of his next words build. "Don't fail me again. Dismissed."

* * *

He was eating in his ready room when the comms chirped. It was Cornwell. Klingons had broken through the Federation lines and the dilithium mining colony of Corvan II was under attack. She played him the distress call: a man, covered in grime and blood, pleading for help from someone, anyone. A little girl, crying for her mother in the background. Lorca's jaw slackened. He could hear the little girl crying even after the transmission cut off.

The colony was responsible for forty percent of the Federation's dilithium. Without it, half the fleet would be rendered immobile, and the nearest Federation ship was eighty-four hours away. The colony's shield would last another six hours at most. By that point, the colony would be no more.

Discovery could reach the colony in time. "You have no doubts?" said Cornwell.

"None," said Lorca. This was not a situation where doubt was allowed.

In the engineering lab, Stamets immediately declared it impossible: "Jumping is probabilistic. The longer the jump, the more possible outcomes." In essence, they could jump a long way, but Stamets still could not control where they ended up. He had, at least, determined the Glenn's demise was due to a Hawking radiation firewall, so Discovery would not share the same fate.

"I get it, it's trial and error. Let's _try_ something," said Lorca. He would not let Stamets of all people turn him into a liar.

The only thing they had available to try was Straal's augmented navigation system, which seemed to require a supercomputer neither they nor the Glenn possessed.

They tried to make it work without.

* * *

It did not. They jumped into the gravity well of a star, and only by the skin of their teeth did they make it out alive.

He left the bridge. In the turbolift, he let out a yell of pure, unbridled fury and kicked the side of the turbolift in frustration. It wasn't enough for him to manufacture battles to bring to them, he needed this ship to be able to bring the fight to the Klingons in a much more real sense than it currently was. Despite his total confidence with Cornwell, the fact was Discovery's spore drive still wasn't ready.

Stamets was in sickbay being treated for a skull fracture incurred in the aftermath of the most recent jump. Culber was mothering and nagging him to be careful, and at first, Lorca kept his calm, was patient, and simply sought to confirm that Stamets was all right and could return to work.

Then Stamets suggested he would leave the ship and take every bit of his research with him. Though this was not within Stamets' power to do, and they both knew it, it rankled Lorca.

"How do you want to be remembered in history? Alongside the Wright Brothers? Elon Musk? Zefram Cochrane? Or as a failed fungus expert. A selfish little man who put the survival of his own ego before the lives of others."

This searing indictment was enough to drive Stamets back to engineering with sullen resolution, blood still caking his face and hands.

Lorca did not feel the point was entirely made. If the crew were going to fail him, at least let them appreciate the magnitude of that failure the way he did.

He played the latest Corvan II transmission for the whole ship. It was, by its own words, potentially the last transmission the colony would ever make. The little girl was audible, now crying for her mother to wake up, and the transmission was as much as plea for help as it was a larger goodbye to the universe at large. The people of Corvan II had come to terms with the fact they were probably not going to live to see another day. They were the walking dead, crying into the void in the vain hopes of a miracle.

In the biology lab, Landry listened to the transmissions and her heart hardened with determination. She took a gun from the wall and one of the daggers in Lorca's collection. "I'm gonna lop off its claw so you can figure out what makes that thing so good at killing Klingons," she said to Burnham, and opened the containment pen.

The sedation protocols had no effect on the creature. It tore through Landry as if she were a rag doll.

Lorca was still in sickbay being lectured by Culber about how Stamets was doing his absolute best when Burnham and Landry beamed in via emergency medical transport. Lorca stared at the bloodied figure on the ground, realizing who it was only because of the presence of Michael Burnham. Landry's face was torn, her chest shredded. The creature's claws, which could make quick work of starships, had made even quicker work of her.

He stood beside Burnham, his arms crossed, powerless to do anything but watch as Culber tried to secure what little life there was left in Landry, but there was nothing Culber could do.

As he looked at Landry's mutilated body, Lorca could hear Billingsley's words echoing in his head: _Everything you touch dies_. He felt a bitter rage rise inside him. He turned to Burnham and said, "Find a use for that creature. Don't let her death be in vain." The look on his face seemed for a moment to contain a genuine flicker of sadness in it. Then he turned away and was gone.

* * *

One of Landry's last living acts was to name the monster "Ripper." Even after Burnham proved the creature was a danger only in response to threats, the moniker stuck. It was appropriately what the thing had done to the person who named it.

Then Burnham drew the connection between the creature and the mycelial network.

Ripper, it turned out, was their supercomputer. A _biological_ supercomputer. Once again, Stamets' assertion made manifest.

They jumped to Corvan II.

They were surrounded by Klingons. "Full stop," Lorca ordered, and the crew complied despite the fear-tinged unease they all felt at the present course of inaction.

They were a sitting target. The Klingons broke off their assault of the colony's shields and turned all their attention to the Federation vessel that had appeared out of seemingly nowhere, as if it had been cloaked right beside them the entire time.

The green light of the Klingons' phasers flashed across the Discovery's shields. Lorca waited. He waited as each strike dropped the shields ever lower, past seventy and then fifty percent. He waited as the Klingons drew close enough for him to make out the speckle of lights in the portholes of the Klingon ships, close enough to imagine the uncompromising Klingons already celebrating Discovery's demise. He waited as Discovery's shields dropped below ten percent, raising his hands towards the viewscreen as if conducting a symphony of phaserlight and starships. He waited as the Klingons drew in for the killing strike.

And then, as that strike was thrown, they jumped.

They left something in their wake. High-yield explosive charges ripped through the Klingons in the skies above Corvan and turned the entire flotilla of Klingon ships into a rain of fire onto the world below.

Every single Klingon ship destroyed in one grand move, and Discovery was gone, like it had never been there in the first place. No one—not the colonists, especially not the Klingons—was any the wiser as to instrument of their salvation. The secret of the spore drive remained intact.

Around him on the bridge were smiles and uncertain laughs of shocked relief. The trust that they had placed in him as captain had borne fruit. They were the heroes of Corvan II, and even if no one else knew, they could all rest well knowing they had finally done something truly significant in the greater scale of things.

The colonists of Corvan II sent out a new transmission. This time it was not a cry for help but a celebration of the miracle that the remaining colonists, the dilithium, all of it was safe. In this transmission, Lorca saw the little girl again, crying but alive, and it was all of it, even Landry's death, worthwhile for the sight of those people saved.

* * *

In the immediate after action debrief, Cornwell deemed his strategy reckless but effective, and was gratified that the spore drive remained secret. "This proves to everyone the value of Discovery," she said, and Lorca was heartened enough to be mildly pleased with himself.

He was also entirely exhausted and ready to rest, but when he finally stepped into his quarters for some well-deserved sleep, there was a familiar sound. "Lab 26 to Lorca." He smiled. Lalana still had access to the ship's security feeds on the off chance their shadowy friend turned up again and apparently had been watching the feed outside his quarters waiting for him to be alone.

She appeared on the room's holocomm as if transported, the one thing she could not be, and he managed a smile. "Evening."

"Gabriel." Lului voices had very little tonal variation, but he was familiar enough with hers to recognize a note of uncharacteristic softness in it. "I am very sorry about Ellen."

She was here to offer her condolences. Lorca sighed softly. "You don't have to do that. It's fine."

"Is it?" she responded.

He rubbed his face, tired enough to not want to deal with this right now. "I don't have time to mourn anyone, Lalana. People die. This is a war."

"That's what he thought, too."

"Who?" asked Lorca, expecting the answer to be Groves, or maybe O'Malley.

"The you I fell in love with."

That gave him pause. He looked at her with confusion. "I _am_ the person you fell in love with."

"Yes, you are, but you are not the man who said it."

He felt a chill and his mouth went dry. "What are you saying."

Her head tilted. "Only what I have said. You are a very different person, are you not? From the Gabriel Lorca you used to be."

Lorca relaxed. Sometimes the computer's lului translations were overly literal and the nuance of metaphor was lost. "War does that to people."

"Yes," she said. "But I am still here, and I have not changed, so tell me everything and I will listen."


	62. A Matter of Record

A/N: This chapter takes place after episode 4, "The Butcher's Knife Cares Not for the Lamb's Cry."

* * *

"You know, she actually walked right by me when she first came aboard?"

Major John Allan and Lieutenant Einar Larsson were standing outside the door to Lab 26, as they usually did at this hour. They were standing on hour eleven of Allan's shift and hour three of Larsson's. Despite the long hours, Allan was his usual fresh-faced, chipper self.

Despite the short hours, Larsson was already brutally annoyed. He looked like a hulking behemoth next to Allan and hated how chatty the major was. His only response to Allan's latest anecdote was an entirely disinterested, "Oh?"

"Really? You don't think that's kind of interesting?"

"Meh," said Larsson with a shrug.

Allan shook his head. "But you like history." It was the only thing they had in common.

"I like it less when I am living in it," said Larsson bitterly, adjusting his grip on his rifle. "Burnham is bad luck."

Allan sighed, shook his head, and glanced at the ceiling. "You are the weirdest historian I have ever met."

"I wrote a history book. That doesn't make me an historian."

"Doesn't it?" asked Allan. Larsson shook his head. Allan shrugged. "I think living history is the best way to experience it."

"Yeah, no, living history is great," deadpanned Larsson. "It's a great way to die, 'cause you know what gets written up in history books? Deaths and battles. You know what doesn't? They lived happily ever after with three kids and had lots of sex."

"Three kids? Really?" said Allan laughingly. He had not taken Larsson for a family man.

"Well, not in my version," admitted Larsson, finally cracking a small smile. "Now come on, can we just stand here like we're paid to do?"

Allan inclined his head at Larsson. "Paid?" Then he figured it out and laughed. "History joke! I got it. Good one. About how people used to be paid to do things." People were still paid for doing things, just not in the way they had been paid in the past.

Larsson rolled his eyes. He much preferred being on shift with O'Malley. The colonel was pleasantly quiet company.

There was a faint alert in their earpieces. The lab door opened from within and Mischkelovitz emerged. Allan's face lit up. "Melly!" She did not respond in kind. She looked dejected, her face downcast, her feet shuffling. Allan waved to get her attention. "Where are you headed?"

Mischkelovitz pointed up.

"Does Rove know where you're going?" A nod. "Do you want me to come with?" She shook her head and shuffled away. Allan watched her go with a look of concern.

Larsson considered Allan's expression. "I'll stay here if you want to go after," he offered, which was unusually charitable of him. Only one of them actually needed be on the door at all times. It so happened Larsson took more breaks than Allan and O'Malley combined and for once seemed to have the inclination to rectify that imbalance.

Allan's head shook faintly. "No," he said. "I can't get involved." Then he lapsed into a silence that lasted the rest of his shift.

* * *

Lorca was waiting for her. He watched her slowly make her way to the bridge in answer to his summons, trudging one reluctant step at a time, walking so close to the wall that her shoulder brushed it and her fingers trailed across its surface. She seemed faintly dazed, lost in her own thoughts. She even walked into a security bulkhead at one point, just bumped right into it, not realizing it was right in front of her. Then she stood at the turbolift longer than was necessary.

He watched as she finally got into the turbolift and he shut off the feed and turned to face the window so he had his back to the door when she finally arrived.

Mischkelovitz stopped midway between his desk and the door and stood in the dim light, waiting. The tribble on his desk let out a tiny purr.

After a minute, he gestured to her with a small sweep of his arm and flick of his finger. "Come here," he said, voice firm and mildly impatient.

She shuffled forward and joined him at the window. The vista of stars was blue-tinged today. The pinpricks of light revealed the shape of an arm of the galaxy. They stood there, looking out the window, the only movement the nervous twist of Mischkelovitz's hands. This motion meant the exact opposite as it did with Lalana.

Finally, he asked, "What do you see?" She did not answer, but he had not entirely expected she would. "Do you know how many stars there are right now in front of us?" Another pause as he let her consider that, his own eyes sweeping across the impossibly vast corridor of light. "More than even you can count. In a thousand lifetimes we couldn't see all of them, and we only get the one. Don't you wish you could see them all? The untold wonders." A smile tugged at his mouth.

It was possible, when there was no war, when there were no enemies, to run and see as many of them as you could.

"And to think, there might be a whole 'nother universe of stars out there. And maybe, just maybe, we can go and see it ourselves. Now wouldn't that be an adventure? Don't you want to see it, Mischka?"

Her hands had gone still. Then her right hand moved, slowly, intentionally, towards his arm. Her thumb and forefinger curled around the cuff of his sleeve. His shifted his hand off the windowsill and folded it over hers, looking down towards her as he did. Her eyes were wide and glistening and she was biting her lip. She shook her head.

Lorca was confused and it showed. She had no desire to see the stars? The he realized what she meant and exhaled with a growl of annoyance. "You have no idea what I just said, do you?" He sighed and looked back out at the stars. What a waste of a perfectly good speech.

When Dr. Culber arrived in the ready room, Lorca and Mischkelovitz were both standing in front of the monitor on the wall and Lorca was leaning over to try and make out something Mischkelovitz was saying, but Mischkelovitz startled at the opening of the door and slid between Lorca and the wall.

Culber knew Mischkelovitz by appearance and reputation but had never actually been in the same room with her before now. A few times he had attempted to organize some sort of communication between them—they were both medical doctors—but she had ignored him at every turn. Now, she seemed to be shrinking away from him, inching behind Lorca, of all people, as if she needed the captain to protect her from Culber.

"Captain," said Culber, looking uncertainly at Mischkelovitz. He had expected this to be about Stamets or something to do with operations in sickbay but Mischkelovitz's presence made both subjects unlikely.

"I need you to fix something," said Lorca to Culber, then turned towards Mischkelovitz. "Mischka?" Mischkelovitz cowered and did not move. Lorca frowned and closed his eyes a moment, then grabbed her by the arm and pulled her back in front of the monitor. He stood behind her and cupped the sides of her head with his hands so her gaze was directed straight at the screen. Culber noticed an active audio transcript display. At the top were written the words, _Mischka, you just let me prattle on like a fool over there, didn't you?_ followed by, _What?_ and then every word since Culber's arrival.

As Lorca spoke, new words appeared.

" _You are going to tell Dr. Culber exactly how to fix these implants and then we are never having this conversation again, do you understand?_ " Lorca's voice was an angry hiss through gritted teeth, but Mischkelovitz saw only words on a screen, devoid of any tone, and felt Lorca's right thumb lightly stroked her temple, where Culber could not see. She nodded slightly.

"Implants?" said Culber.

Lorca pulled back the hair on the left side of Mischkelovitz's head and tapped near the implant. "Right here."

Culber took a step forward for a closer look and Mischkelovitz shied away slightly, but Lorca held her firmly in place. Culber blinked. "I've never seen that sort of implant before. Where is it from?"

"She made it, which is why she'll be able to walk you through repairing it." Lorca smirked, patted Mischkelovitz twice on the head, and finally released her.

Mischkelovitz turned away from the monitor and started rapidly shaking her head at Lorca. Lorca responded with an annoyed frown. "A moment, doctor," he said, and Culber exited.

They were alone again. "Please don't make me go alone, I don't like doctors," she said.

"You're a doctor," pointed out Lorca.

"Only because one of us had to be. It made sense if it was me."

The explanation meant nothing to Lorca. "You don't have to go alone, you can bring whoever you want."

She watched the words appear on the transcript, then turned back to him and said, "You."

Lorca sighed heavily. "Not me. I meant Mally or Groves. Saru, if you like." He could certainly spare his first officer for a few hours.

She looked at the monitor, then at his desk. "Can I bring your tribble?"

Lorca stared at her. "You want _Merkin?_ "

Mischkelovitz blinked at the name as it appeared on the monitor. She suddenly squeaked. The squeak turned into a laugh. The sort of unending, hysterical laugh he remembered from that entertainment program she loved. She was utterly delighted.

Lorca chuckled, both at her reaction and because Merkin's name was his own little awful joke. He let her laugh for a minute, then touched her on the shoulder to get her to stop. "You can bring Merkin on one condition." There was a reason he had called her up to his ready room. The ensuing nonsense had pulled them far away from that reason, but it was high time they attended to it. "This thing with you and Burnham, it's not going to be a problem, is it?"

All trace of laughter vanished as Mischkelovitz considered the words on the monitor carefully. "She's a monster, right? Like me. But you like monsters and that's why you give us all second chances."

Lorca was not sure the word "monster" applied to Burnham, but it was clear Mischkelovitz felt the term accurately described herself and it definitely applied to Ripper and perhaps Lalana, so he smirked and said, "I like monsters very much."

Mischkelovitz smiled then. "Mally likes monsters, too. My brother has a well of compassion as deep as the ocean. And there are lots of monsters in the ocean deep." She had a weird expression on her face, a sort of crazed half-smile. There was something familiarly unsettling about it. He realized it reminded him of when she had said Groves never needed to be taught the same thing twice. There was something really bizarre in the way she summarized her family members.

He sent her on her way with the tribble and a pair of fortune cookies and stared at the transcript for a moment before closing it and returning the view to the tactical display of the war. Monsters in the ocean deep. The same could be said for the depths of space, and certainly there were plenty of monsters on Discovery. The list simply did not include Michael Burnham.

* * *

Fixing the implants took hours. One of them had been out of commission for several months, ever since the Edison. The other had finally met its end after weeks of intermittent failure when Mischkelovitz walked into the bulkhead on her way to the bridge.

The implants were not the main thing that concerned Culber. Mischkelovitz looked at Culber the way most people looked at Lorca. Culber gave her a padd with the computer's transcript turned on and assured her multiple times that she had nothing to worry about, but she still flinched and shuddered and recoiled from him. "Let's just get this over with," was the extent of the consideration she was willing to give him. She laid down on the slab and stared at a visual feed of Culber's work, incessantly muttering to herself with Lorca's tribble pressed against her collarbone, the muttering ceasing only for those moments when she issued directions.

Culber had more experience with implants than he liked thanks to the war, but these implants were something altogether different. They seemed to be fully anatomically integrated. "This is amazing," he said. "You incorporated the existing tissues."

"Yes, well, the way other people do implants is all wrong," said Mischkelovitz, refusing to be flattered. "You can't just push aside the existing tissue structures or throw things on top." Technically you could, but it seemed Mischkelovitz's stance was that you shouldn't.

The tissue integration made the repairs all the more delicate. It was obvious why Mischkelovitz had been unable to do them herself. This task required a mixture of engineering and surgery expertise, emphasis on the surgery, and the person operating needed to be able to access the location easily and fully.

The first implant came back online. Mischkelovitz sat up. Culber offered her a genuine smile despite her cantankerous behavior. Doctors often made the worst patients. "That's better, right?" She said nothing but laid back down on her other side. He started on the other implant.

"You know," Culber said, thinking that he could break through to her now that she could hear his voice, "it wasn't right the way the captain grabbed you. You should consider filing a report."

"Stop," said Mischkelovitz. Culber immediately pulled his hands back from the repairs.

"Did I hit a nerve?"

He meant it in the literal sense, but it applied only in the figurative. Mischkelovitz sat up, bits of wire and flesh hanging down the side of her neck, and glared at Culber. "I'm here because the captain asked me to be. If you have a problem with that you can take it up with him. But so long as he says I'm welcome here on Discovery, I'm not leaving."

Culber blinked. He in no way meant to imply Mischkelovitz was the one that ought to leave Discovery. "Just because the captain brought you onboard doesn't give him, or anyone, the right to grab you."

Mischkelovitz stared at Culber without blinking. The tribble cooed and quivered in her hands. "Are you threatening my captain?"

"Of course not. I'm only trying to look out for you," said Culber sincerely.

"You think you have that right?"

"When you're a patient on my table? Yes, I do."

"I only ever had the one patient and they tried to lock me up for looking after him."

Culber swallowed. The first time he read the medical report on the Edison incident it had turned his stomach. The second time, too, and the third. That anyone could prolong the suffering of another human the way Mischkelovitz had was unthinkable, and worse, she had done it to someone she loved when it was well beyond the scope of medical science to save him. Sometimes it was less important to save a life and more important to do no harm.

The principle also applied here. Culber plastered a smile on his face and said with false cheerfulness, "Lie down and I'll finish fixing that implant, all right?" Mischkelovitz obeyed and Culber resumed work because at the end of the day, it was impossible to save someone from themselves.

* * *

There were precious few people on Discovery who had any affection for Michael Burnham, but Cadet Sylvia Tilly was one.

As Tilly had exclaimed when first meeting Burnham in the room they shared, having a roommate was like having a built-in friend. On a ship where most of the crew seemed to view her with open hostility, Michael Burnham was quietly relieved to at least have the one. It made mealtimes slightly less awkward.

They were sitting in the mess hall at one of the middle tables with a zone of emptiness around them. Not only did most people not want to be seen associating with Burnham, even sitting at a table next to hers was apparently unpalatable. Tilly was chattering on about some of her experiences at the Academy. The chatter was of little interest of use to Burnham, but processing her experiences aloud seemed to help Tilly and she seemed not to care that Burnham was barely listening.

Burnham noticed the same group of three people come in as always appeared at this time. The first was a man, tall and with a vaguely haggard look, wearing an unranked specialist uniform like her own, but in the bronze color of ops. The second was a woman in medical white and grey, and the third a freckled man of modest height with the solid black insignia badge that never meant anything good in Burnham's experience. They grabbed food and took up a table to themselves.

"Who are they?" she asked, interrupting Tilly's latest anecdote about a group project in an engineering course where she had ended up doing all the work for her groupmates.

"Oh, well that's Dr. Frankenstein."

"Frankenstein?" repeated Burnham, not believing that for a minute.

"Emellia Mischkelovitz? And that's John Groves with her." When no flicker of recognition appeared on Burnham's face, Tilly's lit up with amazement. "Oh, you don't know! Oh, gosh. You were in prison, weren't you? So you didn't hear. Okay, well, she and her husband, Milosz, were on the Edison. Her husband was basically the best theoretical engineer Starfleet has ever had, a personal hero of mine, his work was just... wow! And apparently a lot of it was classified, so, if I ever had the security clearance, just think the sort of things..."

"Tilly," said Burnham, mildly impatient.

"Right, sorry. They were on the Edison, and at the Battle of the Binary Stars, the Edison was..." Tilly trailed off, looking at Burnham with concern.

"I know what happened to the Edison," said Burnham unemotionally. She knew the fates of every ship at the Battle of the Binary Stars and felt the weight of all eight thousand of the lives lost. Sometimes a Vulcan upbringing had its advantages.

"But you don't know what happened _on_ the Edison. They were trapped in a sealed compartment, and he had been pinned or cut in half or something, and she cut off his head and attached it to an artificial heart. When they found them, he was just screaming and screaming and screaming. I heard they froze his head."

Burnham forced herself to eat another forkful of mashed squash, suddenly not feeling quite so hungry.

Tilly continued, "They charged her with, I think, gross negligence, torture, and experimenting on him? And John Groves was her lawyer, and he got her acquitted on all charges, but everyone says she should have been convicted on at least one charge. No one knows what she's working on, except that John Groves is involved, which is really weird because he's not a scientist? So maybe it's because he's supposed to be making sure she doesn't violate all standards of ethics again." Tilly's shook her head as if erasing this entire conversation from her mind. "Henderson thinks they got secretly married or something, but can you imagine marrying someone who did something like that to her first husband? And the captain's always checking on their research. It's a huge mystery. Actually, I tried to sit with them one time and they gave me the _dirtiest_ looks..."

Burnham listened to Tilly prattle on with half an ear and glanced at the trio in the corner. For every one of Lorca's promised miracles, there seemed to be two mysteries.

* * *

Burnham walked by Lab 26 three times over the next two days. Each time the door was guarded, the first time by a giant blonde with a perpetual scowl. The second time, the blonde was joined by the freckled man from the dining hall, and the third time, the freckled man was accompanied by a dark-haired man about Burnham's age. On this third pass, the freckled man confronted her.

"Specialist Burnham," he said, revealing the presence of an accent in his biting tone. "Is there something I can help you with?"

"No, sir," said Burnham, feigning innocence. "I was just on my way to—"

"Oh, I'm sure you were," he said. "You should try finding another route. Ship's a big circle, you know, so no matter which way you go, you'll reach your destination. Mind you do that without passing by here so much, eh?"

"Yes, sir," said Burnham, and proceeded on.


	63. A Laughing Rain

A/N: This chapter covers the events of episode 5, "Choose Your Pain."

* * *

The salvation of Corvan II was only the first of many miracles. In the ensuing weeks, Discovery broke the Klingon supply lines at Benzar and routed an attack in the Ophiuchus system. In the eyes of Starfleet Command, the spore drive was now a proven technology, and one they needed in all their ships.

They summoned him to the forward command station for a strategy meeting and demanded the technology be rolled out for more starships, but the problem was not their ability to duplicate the drive technology. The real limiting factor was the tardigrade. They only had the one, and without Ripper, the spore drive was unreliable at best and dangerously unstable at worst.

Lorca stood there as Cornwell, apparently failing to appreciate the fact Discovery had only obtained its tardigrade by accident, insisted he somehow do more to make the drive available to everyone else while simultaneously berating him for putting their only fully-operational spore drive at risk by _actually using it_.

Worse, she seemed entirely oblivious to her own hypocrisy.

He tried to object to her, rank be damned, because this was as unfortunate a tactical failing on her part as could occur, and she responded to this breach of respect by doubling down firmly in front of the other admirals and captains assembled:

"We believe the enemy may have identified Discovery as our secret weapon. You are hereby ordered to reign in your use of the spore drive unless authorized by Starfleet."

How, he wondered as he stood there listening to Cornwell denigrate his achievements, could they possible call it a secret weapon if they did not deploy it?

There was also the issue that every jump seemed to drain the tardigrade, but this meeting was going badly enough without him giving Cornwell an actual problem to castigate him about, so he kept that fact to himself.

When the meeting concluded, he hung back in the conference room and considered everything that had just gone down, quietly condemning the entire assembly of blowhards and fools who had decided to sideline their best weapon when they needed it most.

He was there long enough that the medicine in his eyes began to wear off. He dimmed the lights and began to reapply it. He had only dosed one of his eyes when the lights went suddenly to full and he let out a strangled cry of pain and shouted, "Turn it down!"

It was Cornwell. "Sorry. Didn't know you were still in here," she said, too casual for it to be an honest apology, because it wasn't. She was still displeased about his attempt to counter her orders during the meeting and clearly failed to appreciate the fact his insubordination had been partly an attempt to save her from her own tactical shortcomings. To her, it was simply the latest in a recent string of insubordinations stemming from her failure to keep a tighter rein on him over the years. The only thing worse than a subordinate's misbehavior was the realization that you had bred it into existence yourself.

Lorca also suspected she had entirely known he was in still in the room and turned the lights up on purpose, because she immediately launched into a lecture about the unfortunate nature of his decision to interpret a captain's wartime powers as permission to enlist convicted criminal Michael Burnham into his crew.

He was supposed to have the latitude to fight this war as he saw fit but at every turn Cornwell seemed to be denying him this crucial autonomy. The one person in Starfleet Command he thought would have his back and all she wanted was to hold him back.

It was jealousy, he decided. "Are you uncomfortable with the power I've been given, admiral?"

"I'm your friend," she said, immediately seeing through the accusation for what it was.

"Mm-hm," he replied, sounding about as convinced of that as he was of the wisdom of their decision to suspend Discovery's involvement in the war. He stood up from the conference table. "It's my ship. My way."

He left her there, walked out, because it was the only thing he could do to keep from erupting into an exchange of words they would both regret.

* * *

He was still thinking over the meeting's events as he sat in the shuttle on the way back to Discovery. What if they never found another tardigrade? Then sidelining Discovery would have been for nothing. How could Cornwell not see that? It also hardly mattered if Discovery survived the war or not, at least where the drive technology was concerned. Starfleet had the schematics and information needed to make it work if they could locate another tardigrade. And if the technology fell into hands of the Klingons without access to a tardigrade, well, that would probably cause the Klingons to do more harm to themselves than anything else.

The only point he could think of in Cornwell's favor was if—and it was a big if—both the drive and Ripper fell into the Klingons' hands, it would be game over.

He'd blow up the ship before letting that happen. Certainly he'd proven his willingness to do as much already.

Alarms began going off in the shuttle.

"Warning. Incoming warp signature detected."

The Klingons were on top of them like butter on toast, the green light of a tractor beam shimmering through the shuttle windows. Lorca grabbed the phaser rifles by the door, tossed one to the pilot, and took up a position to the side of the door, but the pilot was not a savvy tactician and stood in the middle of the shuttle absent any cover. The Klingons were upon him almost as soon as the doors were open.

Lorca never got the chance to fire his rifle. The Klingons had anticipated his position and wrenched it from his hands, forcing him to resort to throwing punches against opponents who were stronger, better armed, and outnumbered him. A Klingon female clad entirely in white grabbed him and pushed him up against the wall. There was no winning this situation, but as the shuttle pilot slid to the floor, dead from a pair of stabs to the chest, Lorca realized that if the Klingons wanted him dead they would have done so.

He held up his hands in surrender. He heard the Klingon woman say his name.

This was no mere happenstance. He had been targeted.

The Klingon woman pushed him into the cruiser's corridors, driving him like a sheep through dark, angular hallways.

"A little rougher back there and I might think you were coming on to me," quipped Lorca. The Klingon jabbed her fist into his back, pushing him to his knees, and he smiled to himself as he got back up. "Now we're talking."

The next time she hit him, the lights went out.

* * *

The news of Lorca's capture rippled across Discovery. Saru found himself suddenly acting captain under circumstances he would never had asked for in a million years. The idea of attaining captaincy by such means was not only unfortunate, it was deeply unsettling.

He did not feel ready.

Cornwell's orders were clear. Recover Lorca before the Klingons could pry the secrets of the spore drive from him. It was a deceptively simple task, but Saru promised it could be done, even if he was not certain it could be. With Cornwell's words echoing in his ears, Saru questioned whether he was the correct person to carry these orders out.

And then Burnham came to tell him she thought they should stop using the tardigrade, the one thing that potentially offered them an edge when it came to rescuing Lorca, because the creature was reaching its limit. They discussed it in Lorca's ready room, which was unfortunately available.

"I mentioned this to the captain and he said we would discuss it when he came back," Burnham said.

"The captain is not coming back unless we can rescue him," said Saru. "And for that we will need the tardigrade."

Burnham remained intent on having Saru come around to her perspective. "I'm concerned that we are negatively impacting the tardigrade with each jump we make..." Her argument was fervent and sound, but Saru had been pushed around by Michael Burnham enough in his life. He denied Burnham's request and declared no further discussion of the subject until after the captain was back.

As Burnham left, Saru felt in some way that he was already failing Lorca. He requested data from the computer on Starfleet's most decorated captains and saw Georgiou's name on the list, but the information did not help him. It was too abstract.

There was one person who knew Lorca better than anyone. He sought her out.

Lalana's response to the news of Lorca's kidnap was to press her hands so tightly together it seemed as if they might break. Her fur writhed faintly. "I very much wish to know what you believe Captain Lorca would do in this situation," said Saru.

Lalana did not reply immediately. When she finally spoke, she said this:

"You must do absolutely everything and anything you can to return the captain to Discovery. If you do not get Gabriel back, then everything on this ship will collapse. You must not let this happen, Saru. If you do anything and everything, then you will succeed, so that is what you must do. Do not let anyone stop you or stand in your way. Discovery is not Discovery without Captain Lorca. And as for myself, I am not done with his face."

Saru stared. "Surely that is an exaggeration."

"Is it? This ship is like an ecosystem. Gabriel's will brought it together and has been tending it since. He has protected everyone, he has created this ambitious project into which we have all been swept. He is what humans call 'a true visionary.' I think you are most interesting, Mr. Saru, but are you possessed of vision such as your captain has? Get him back, Saru. For all of our sakes."

As Saru passed back through the lab on his way out, he saw Mischkelovitz cradling Lorca's tribble and whispering to it. "Shh. Don't worry, Gabe's coming back." Saru did not think she intended the words for the tribble so much as herself.

* * *

Lorca awoke in a Klingon cell in the company of three other human prisoners.

The first was Harcourt Fenton Mudd, a bearded civilian who loftily announced his presence to be the result of a failure to pay off creditors for the purchase of a moon. Tossed to the Klingons in lieu of a debtor's prison. He had a pet with him, a sort of space tarantula he called Stuart.

The second was a human whose name Lorca never got, because the Klingons came in and made short work of the man as a demonstration of their cruelty for Lorca's benefit. Lorca reacted viscerally to the sight of the man's beating, closing his eyes and wincing as the crunch of the man's head under the Klingon's boot suggested he had outlived his usefulness to the Klingons. The Klingons dragged the man's corpse away by the leg for disposal.

"You're gonna want to stick with me," said Mudd in the silence that followed the Klingons' departure. "I'm a survivor, just like you." The notion disgusted Lorca.

The third prisoner Lorca only discovered after Mudd had fallen asleep. A Starfleet lieutenant, his uniform caked with untold weeks of filth, hiding behind some conduits, had slept through the entire exchange with the Klingon guards. The fact that he had slept through such a horrible event said a lot about the state of things in this prison ship, as well as how long the lieutenant had been here. The man's brain had adjusted to such commotion as background noise and found it no reason to wake up.

Lorca sat down on the floor. The light burned his eyes. His ocular spray had been lost in the dust-up with the Klingons. Screams echoed down the hallways. His head was still pulsing faintly from the whack the white-clad woman had knocked him out with.

Despite the situation, despite all of the terror and despair and sheer hopelessness of it all, the lieutenant offered Lorca some food he had ferreted away, a piece of stale cracker. Lorca refused. The young man clearly needed it more than Lorca did. The lieutenant insisted: "I already lost one captain, I don't want to lose another."

There was a heavy strain of loyalty in those words. That was something Lorca appreciated in an officer. "What's your name, soldier?"

"Lieutenant Ash Tyler."

Tyler had been on the Yeager, a ship disabled at the Battle of the Binaries seven months ago. Seven months in Klingon prison. When Lorca pointed this out, Tyler gave a small laugh. The reaction struck Lorca as wrong. "Nobody survives Klingon torture for seven months."

Apparently they did when the Klingon captain in charge of the torture took a liking to them. The white-clad Klingon woman.

Lorca could see the pain on the Tyler's face admitting this. He focused Tyler on the facts: the crew complement, the layout, the information they needed to escape. Lorca just needed to find his way to an active comm relay to signal Discovery.

"We're deep within enemy territory," said Tyler. He had long since learned the futility of hope in this place. "There's no way a Federation ship can make it out this far undetected."

"Oh, my ship can," promised Lorca with a smile. "It's like a ghost." Then Mudd's little spider made off with the cracker, purloining the sole source of sustenance in the room for its obnoxious master.

The Klingons came for Lorca not long after. They grabbed him by the neck and dragged him away to the feet of their white-clad captain, depositing him first onto the floor and then yanking him up to his feet and strapping him into an immobilizing chair.

"Have you ever been tortured before, captain?"

He answered her questions with non sequiturs. She asked about torture, he complimented her English. She listed off his victories the past three weeks, beginning with Corvan, as a sort of taunt. There must have been another Klingon ship cloaked at Corvan that had brought back news of Discovery. Damn that cloaking technology. He was going to have Mischkelovitz redirect more time to cracking it when he got back. The mycelial map was not more important than stopping the Klingons.

Then she called his ship a ghost, the exact words he had spoken to Tyler. Her English was good, but not so good she could have plucked that word out of nowhere.

There was a spy in that prison cell.

She knew, too, about his photosensitivity. When she mentioned it, Lorca taunted her for sleeping with Tyler. She slammed her hand across his face and said, "How strange space must look to you now, through those damaged eyes. A cosmos full of agonizing light."

She may have known some facts about him, but he knew right then and there she would never understand him fully, even if she was right on some counts. As she fixed his eyelids open and blasted his eyes with light that turned his voice into a rising scream of agony, he took comfort in the fact she did not grasp the magnitude of his will, the truths of his desires, or the strength of his endurance.

"Tell me your secret!" she demanded, switching off the lights so he could provide an answer that was not a wordless scream. "Tell me what it is that makes Discovery do what other ships cannot!"

"The secret," he said, "is to use an extra stick of butter. Salted. Make those cookies fluff right up."

The lights came back on. His eyes watered desperately, unable to blink away the burn of air on the surface of his eyeballs and equally powerless to staunch the flood of light. His scream formed words. "Stop! Turn it off!"

The lights remained on. "Tell me and it will stop!"

He screamed, and screamed, and then it turned into a laugh. The Klingon captain stared at Lorca in faint amazement. She was certain by the readouts of the medical monitors on the walls that he was in excruciating pain, and yet he was laughing. What kind of monster was this Federation captain?

* * *

Culber administered a set of mild performance enhancers to several key members of Discovery. Unfortunately, Lorca had been taken in late afternoon, three-quarters of the way through most of the day shifts, and they needed their best and brightest on hand if they were going to get him back quickly. With any luck, they would find Lorca before these modest enhancements wore off and the best minds of the crew fell asleep.

He mentioned this to Stamets as he injected the neurostimulator in one of the private rooms off of the main sickbay area.

"Do we have to save him?" asked Stamets, face twisting with desperation.

Culber shook his head at Stamets, smiling faintly. "I know you don't mean that," Culber said.

Stamets pressed a hand to his face. "You're right, I don't, but some part of me..." He sighed. "I hate who he's turning me into! Not to mention what he's doing to my research."

It broke Culber's heart faintly to see Stamets like this and he enveloped his husband into a hug, running his hand across Stamets' back. "He's not making you into anything, you are too strong to be undone by the likes of that man."

"You think?" said Stamets with a hopeful frown, feeling the stubble of Culber's beard on his cheek. It was a comfortingly familiar sensation.

Culber withdrew to arm's length and brushed a hand across Stamets' hair. "I don't think, I know. I know you, Paul Stamets, and you every bit now the man you were when I married you."

"And when you met me?"

That made Culber's lips press into a mischievous smile. "Give me some credit, our meeting made you a much better person." Stamets hummed in satisfaction at that and slid right back towards Culber, kissing him in loving gratitude.

After a moment, Stamets said, "You know what would really help me work?" Culber could scarcely believe what he was hearing. "You said yourself, there's no better way to de-stress and help me focus! In your professional medical opinion—"

Culber shut Stamets up with a kiss that turned into the exact bit of medicine Stamets was requesting. "If the captain finds out we delayed rescuing him for this," said Stamets, then decided Lorca was the last person he wanted to think about for the next few minutes.

When eventually the conversation resumed, Culber went straight back to the subject of the captain. "Now you have to go find him."

Stamets tilted his head. "I'm beginning to think you actually want Lorca back." It was not an accusation, more a confused observation.

Culber considered that. "I don't like Captain Lorca any more than you do, but there are some people on this ship who do like him. And he's not nice to us, but..." Even if Lorca had been a little rough with Mischkelovitz, he had also given her the tribble off his desk to comfort her when she was scared, and Mischkelovitz seemed to adore him, as disturbing as that was.

"I'm sorry, he was nice to someone?" Even the crew who did like Lorca rarely described him as nice. Funny, smart, and good-looking were the most commonly-used positives, usually couched by negatives that seemed to tip the balance more against the captain than for.

Culber shrugged, not sure what to make of it himself. "I'm just saying the man doesn't deserve whatever the Klingons will do to him."

It was a sobering thought. "No, he doesn't," said Stamets. Nobody deserved that.

* * *

Lorca's last words to the Klingon captain were, "Same time tomorrow?" as she retreated from the torture chamber, momentarily defeated by his resolve. The guards escorted Lorca back to his cell, but as dire as circumstances were, this was a resounding victory. He had made it back to Mudd and Tyler on his own two feet, having revealed nothing more damaging than his grandmother's cookie recipe.

Which did not excuse the mole in their midst. The door closed behind him and Lorca charged Mudd, plucked the listening device from Mudd's little "pet," and crushed it under the heel of his boot. "You've been feeding intel on every prisoner that passed through here," Lorca concluded, and threw Mudd's spider against the wall with every ounce of strength he had. Mudd went tearing after the spider, frantic with what seemed to be actual affection.

Tyler followed and pushed Mudd against the wall. "You're finished," he said to Mudd, and then released him, because they were Starfleet, and they did not do the Klingons' dirty work for them, even to Federation traitors like Mudd.

Mudd stroked his spider as he moved away from the wall. "Captain, are you really gonna let this young man humiliate himself by siding with you, hm?"

And then Mudd let Tyler know exactly what kind of captain Lorca was: the kind of captain who abandoned his ship. Mudd knew, as everyone did, the terrible fate of the Buran. His case to Tyler was simple. Lorca was not a captain who deserved Tyler's loyalty, because he had shown none to his own crew.

Lorca stood there and listened to this condemnation, unable and unwilling to deny his actions, guilt etched into his features as surely as anything had ever been. He had to look away. His head hung a moment as he thought of the loss of life at his own hands.

"Apparently, the honorable captain was too good to go down with his ship," said Mudd.

Lorca looked over at Tyler, saw the hurt in Tyler's eyes, and he could not let Mudd's slight go unchallenged. "That's only half-right. We were ambushed and I did... escape. But I didn't let my crew die. I blew them up."

This was a detail Mudd had not known and he looked shocked to hear it.

Lorca told them the sort of fate that awaited Federation crews on Qo'noS, the torture, the parade of death. And when he spoke the words, there was determination despite the anguish of it: "Not my crew. Not on my watch."

He fixed his gaze on Tyler, hoping the young man could understand.

After seven months in a Klingon prison, Tyler seemed to understand all too well.

* * *

Though Saru and Lalana were largely indifferent to the plight of the tardigrade in light of Lorca's circumstances, Stamets listened to Burnham's concerns with sympathy for the creature. The astromycologist felt a kinship towards Ripper. They were both of them connected to the mycelial network: Stamets by his years of research, Ripper by the natural horizontal transfer of DNA.

Stamets shut down the spore drive and began working with Tilly and Burnham to find an alternative to Ripper, some species with a DNA sequence compatible to the tardigrade's that could accept a horizontal transfer of mycelium DNA and replace the tardigrade entirely.

Saru arrived in the engineering lab and was entirely displeased to find the spore drive offline. Despite his explicit instructions to continue with the tardigrade as their supercomputer until Lorca was safely back on the ship, Burnham had yet again ignored his orders and undermined his command. Her lack of respect for him was infuriating, but he kept his calm and listened as she proposed the use of a human host in the tardigrade's place. Performing a horizontal genetic transfer to a human.

After her concern about chemical and biological weapons on Discovery, there had to be some cosmic irony in her proposing a _eugenics_ solution to their problem.

He forbade it and ordered the use of the tardigrade. Rather than comply, in front of Stamets and in front of Tilly, Burnham declared that Saru was upset and implied it was some failing in him as a Kelpien, some natural deficiency of his species.

Saru hit her right back where it hurt and said, "Saving this tardigrade will neither bring back nor change the fact that this is exactly the kind of behavior that killed Captain Georgiou."

He was steel in that moment, but he cut himself as deeply as he did her with those words. Only an interruption from Lieutenant Rhys on the bridge announcing they had located Captain Lorca saved them both from anything worse. Saru ordered the tardigrade into the spore chamber for a jump and confined Burnham to her quarters.

They readied for the jump. "Black alert," said Saru, and then intoned the same word Lorca always did: "Go."

In the engineering lab, the tardigrade screamed, and as the jump completed, it collapsed.

Stamets and Tilly rushed to its side. Neither feared the monstrous creature in that moment, or worried that it would rend them as it had Landry. They saw only a pitiful, suffering thing that shrank down into a protective ball.

Extreme cryptobiosis, Culber announced. The tardigrade, just as its microscopic cousins did, had shed all the water from its body and shrunk down to a hard-shelled husk to weather the crisis. It was not a problem they could fix without risking killing a creature that Culber now believed might be sentient based on recent neurological scans.

"As it is our only way to get out of Klingon space, it is a risk we must take," said Saru. "I do not enjoy being in this position, but I have one hundred and thirty-four souls to protect today."

"I will not be party to murder," said Culber.

"Doctor, I was not talking to you," said Saru, and turned to Stamets and ordered his compliance.

As Culber looked on with a mixture of shock and horror, Stamets said, "Yes, sir," and felt himself die a little as he said it.

* * *

Two Klingon guards arrived to deliver their own personal disbursement of torture to the cell and it was Tyler who took the beating, volunteering for it, to Mudd's immense relief. Lorca's face contorted with conflict at this this turn of events and he turned away and did not watch as the one guard tossed Tyler around the cell while the other stood with his rifle trained on Lorca. Lorca edged away from the carnage, wincing visibly, looking to the guard with the rifle with a confused plea on his face.

After a moment, Tyler did not get up. The guard administering the beating seemed to strut in momentary pride, then whirled about for one last stomp, the sort that had done away with their departed initial cellmate.

Tyler was prepared for it, jumping to his feet as the guard stomped down, taking advantage of the guard's momentum and surprise to turn the attack back towards the Klingon.

Lorca, too, was ready. His overwrought display of anguish had taken him within arm's reach of the rifle. He grabbed it from the other guard, elbowing the Klingon in the face and wrenching the rifle away, then using it as a cudgel to beat the Klingon before managing to get it around the Klingon's neck as leverage to snap the spine. He turned to assist Tyler, the rifle in hand, only to discover Tyler had managed to drop his opponent all on his own.

Tricking the Klingon guard had not been hard because Lorca's distress at watching these Klingon monsters beat Tyler was entirely genuine. As Lorca well knew, the most effective way to fake something was not to fake it. Something tugged at his memory, something Lalana had said back in San Francisco, but he could not remember the exact words. There had been an awful lot of sedatives in his system when she said it.

Lorca tossed Tyler the guard's phaser and held on to the rifle for himself. They stood on bother sides the door, checking if there were any other guards on the other side before they made their escape.

Mudd tried to leave with them. "You sold us out," Lorca said to Mudd, turning the rifle on him. "You stay."

"You can't be serious," said Mudd.

"Oh, but I can," said Lorca, and cracked the rifle across Mudd's deplorable face. Mudd's pleas followed them out into the hallway as Lorca shut the door on him, locking him in there to his fate at the hands of the Klingons.

The pleas turned to promises of vengeance as Mudd realized they would not come back. "You can't walk away from me, Lorca! I'm coming for you, you hear! You haven't seen the last of Harcourt Fenton Mudd!"

* * *

Their escape was not without complications. Lorca and Tyler strode down the halls, vaporizing guards, fending off assaults, but a guard managed to surprise Tyler and further wound the lieutenant to the point where he could barely walk. Lorca pulled Tyler's arm around his shoulder, but it did not last. Tyler slid off onto the ground.

"I'm slowing you down, sir, go."

Lorca did go, but only so far as around the corner. The Klingons in pursuit of them filtered into the hall and Lorca reappeared, firing off a shot towards the white-clad captain that hit the wall of the corridor and blasted the side of her face rather than vaporizing her completely. She lay in the middle of the corridor, screaming in agony as Lorca helped Tyler to his feet and they made their way to the docking bay.

The Klingon ship was not loaded with transport shuttles but with raiders, small assault craft designed to frustrate larger ships. Tyler was surprised to find Lorca seemed to know how to operate the controls. "Redirect all auxiliary power to shields. Blue panel on the right."

There were five raiders in pursuit of them. Lorca manned the guns while Tyler piloted. A good shot picked off one of the five and Lorca winced at the glare of the explosion.

"Your eyes," said Tyler. "That happened when you destroyed the Buran, didn't it?"

"We choose our own pain," said Lorca. "Mine helps me remember."

Ahead of them they saw Discovery. Against the odds, Lorca's ship had found them, but then, that was Discovery through and through. Nothing but miracles aboard.

There were going to need one more miracle, because Discovery had no idea they were coming, and in a Klingon raider, no less. And then the voice came. "Federation starship Discovery to Klingon raider. Identify yourself."

There was the miracle. Lorca grinned and ordered a beam-out. It was good to issue an order to his crew again. The lights of the transporter enveloped them. A moment later, they were on Discovery, and Tyler collapsed onto the transporter pad next to Lorca. Lorca rushed to his side, waving away the guards in attendance. The last thing Tyler needed was to be inundated with unfamiliar faces. "Captain to bridge! You got us! Jump! Jump now!"

They jumped. Tyler did not know what to make of the odd sensation of mycelial travel, but Lorca kept a hand on his shoulder in reassurance. "Thank you, captain," said Tyler.

"For what?" replied Lorca, a mischievous grin appearing on his face. "Dragging you back into the war on a ship with a target on its back."

"There's no place I'd rather be," said Tyler.

That, Lorca thought, was as true a sentiment as could be expressed.

He accompanied Tyler as far as the sickbay doors, made sure he was in good hands, and then strode off down the hall.

Discovery. They were home.

* * *

There was one problem. When Saru called down to the engineering lab to congratulate Stamets on his success, there was no answer.

Stamets had sent the rest of his team out of the lab. Saru overrode Stamets' lockout on the door and they found Stamets collapsed in the middle of the spore chamber, the vial containing Burnham's genetic modification cocktail beside him on the ground. He had injected himself with the gene therapy to spare the tardigrade any further suffering.

"Did we make it?" asked Stamets.

Saru stared at him. "Yes."

Stamets began to laugh with a hysteria that did not at all reassure.

* * *

When Saru finally came face to face with Lorca, he found the captain in his ready room, bloodied by a gash on his lip but grinning infectiously. "Mr. Saru!" said Lorca, throwing his hands up as he turned away from the window. "I hear I have you to thank for spotting us in that raider."

It was true. Burnham might have suggested Saru's Kelpien heritage to be some sort of deficit, but it was that same heritage that had given Saru the clues needed to identify the one raider in the group that had been fleeing from the others. Without that insight, Discovery might have fired on Lorca.

"I owe you my life," said Lorca, "but I should warn you, there's a whole line of people that's true of." He laughed a short, barking laugh, then let out a little exclamation of happy pain and touched the cut on his lip.

"Perhaps you should go to sickbay," said Saru.

"Ah, this? Flesh wound at best," said Lorca, shrugging comically. It was satisfying in a weird way, to be able to choose his own pain.

"Still. You have been through an ordeal, captain, there may be injuries which adrenaline is preventing you from correctly assessing."

That was a very valid point. "You're right, number one. I just had to come here first." He turned and looked out the window again, his window, at his stars. He let out a small, happy sigh.

Saru considered Lorca. Technically, Lorca was not captain again until after he was cleared by a medical examination, and Lorca seemed so uncharacteristically happy if would be a shame to rain on that happiness by sharing the news of the tardigrade's loss and replacement by Stamets. Besides, a case could be made that the captain might not be in the right frame of mind to fully appreciate the information.

"If you will head to sickbay at your earliest convenience, I will resume my duties as first officer for the time being," said Saru. He waited a moment for Lorca to respond by dismissing him as usual, but Lorca seemed too entranced by the view.

Saru turned to leave.

"Saru?"

The Kelpien turned back to look at Lorca and saw an indescribable joy in the captain's face and a glistening in his eyes. Lorca's voice was almost breathless with relief.

"It's so good to be back on Discovery." It almost seemed like Lorca might cry. He did not, but for a moment it seemed that way. "Thank you for the rescue."

Saru jerkily inclined his head. "Of course, captain."

When Saru was gone, Lorca looked around the familiar surroundings of his ready room, grinning uncontrollably, and started laughing with a mixture of relief, joy, and anguish. He was confused by it himself. He managed to curtail the near-hysteria and said, "Computer, site to site transport. Lab 26."

Materializing outside the door was always an inconvenience, but more so right now as he forced himself to keep it together in front of Allan while he waited for the doors to cycle and permit entry.

Lalana was in the main lab area already. She had ascertained the fact of his return from her feed of the main viewscreen. Lorca practically dove towards her, scooping her up and hugging her more tightly than he should as he resumed his confusingly relieved laughter. He barely noticed Mischkelovitz and O'Malley's presences in the room.

O'Malley tugged on Mischkelovitz's arm. "Come on, love, let's give them some space," he said. Mischkelovitz rose and did one thing for Lorca before heading out with O'Malley: she picked up Merkin and put the tribble on the corner of the worktable nearest the captain.

Lorca stood there holding Lalana as the laughter quieted into steady breaths. After what seemed like an eternity, Lorca finally said, "I just want to stay here on Discovery forever. Forever."

"Oh, Gabriel, you do not live that long. Even lului do not live forever."

"Shut up and let me have this, will you?" he said softly, smiling and not least bit perturbed by her correction, because he was just as glad for her ridiculous pedanticism as he was everything else on this ship. His ship.

On the table, Merkin trilled.


	64. Where the Wild Things Are

A/N: Takes place after episode 5, "Choose Your Pain."

Also, I was asked a question about the usage of "Rove" a couple chapters back. Hm, yes, that was odd, wasn't it? I wonder what that was about... (Has anyone been noticing any other odd details? It's almost like there are some secrets around here or something. All shall be revealed in due time...)

And if you are interested in it, there is now a Fortune Cookie Directory on my tumblr.

* * *

Ripper was gone. While Lorca endured a bout of physician-mandated rest (sometimes it was impossible to argue with Starfleet medical, especially when the request was an entirely reasonable "get eight hours of sleep after being tortured" that turned out to be a much-needed ten and then some), Burnham and Tilly released the tardigrade into space under Saru's supervision.

Saru reported this to Lorca in the form of a ready room confession first thing in the morning, admitting he had timed the release so that Lorca could not offer any objections to the action. "The tardigrade had suffered enough," said Saru, "and it was no longer necessary to keep it on board in light of Mr. Stamets ability to compensate for the tardigrade's function."

Lorca registered a distasteful frown. It seemed on the surface to be in response to Saru's little deception, but the truth was more nuanced.

"I will accept any punishment as you see fit," said Saru.

Lorca stood there, silently hemming and hawing, then said, "Dismissed."

Saru did not understand. He was prepared for a lecture from the captain at the very least, or more likely an expression of outright vitriol for his deception. "Sir?"

"Dismissed," Lorca repeated, with more emphasis, but still entirely calm.

Saru wandered out, confused as to why there had been no reprimand.

Lorca turned towards the ready room window. Ripper was out there somewhere, free and unfettered, roaming the mycelial network and dining on mycelium spores. Ripper had murdered Landry and gotten away scot free. Lucky little bastard. Maybe murder was too strong a word, but at the very least, killed in self-defense.

The kicker was that, for all that he had told Burnham to make full use of Ripper, he was fond of the giant tardigrade and would have liked to have been there when they released it, or at least have been afforded the chance to bid it some sort of farewell. He saw a lot of himself in Ripper. Out of all the many living things on the ship, it was the monsters Lorca identified most with. Ripper had been king of the monsters, and if Ripper was king, Lorca was Emperor, because it wouldn't do for the tardigrade to outrank Discovery's captain.

Yes, it was true, they would never be able to plunder the tardigrade's genetic code for new biological materials or technology to exploit, but on some level, Lorca preferred the monster being free. At least one of them was unfettered by any rules or obligations.

He took a cookie from the bowl, shattered it between his hands, and read the fortune. * _Many receive advice, but only the wise profit by it._ * Then, with a certain degree of reluctance, he contacted Starfleet Command.

He received Cornwell in response. Waiting in ambush was more like it. She was as good as the Klingons in that regard. Which, come to think of it, the Klingons had found him as surely as if she had tipped them off. Had it not been for her summons to forward command, he would never have been captured in the first place, and the fact colored his reception towards her. To top it off, their last exchange of words had been largely unkind.

Oblivious to the roiling discontent in Lorca's mind, Cornwell looked genuinely happy to see him alive and well. "Gabriel!"

Lorca grimaced faintly. "Admiral," he said, entirely businesslike. "Reporting in I've been cleared for duty by our CMO and Discovery is back—" he almost said _in action_ but the words were entirely inaccurate "—online."

Cornwell's face fell at the lack of reciprocity. She tried again, exuding friendly concern as she asked, "Are you all right?"

He remained impassive. "Never better."

The stubbornness he was displaying in the moment hurt her and it showed. "Gabriel. It's just me asking. When I realized you'd been taken..." She inhaled, shaking her head as he did, and then exhaled heavily. Words could not express the worry, fear, and upset she had felt at the news.

"Were you worried about me? Or the things I know." He'd seen the orders sent in his absence, watched the replay of her instructing Saru to retrieve him before the secrets of the spore drive could fall into Klingon hands.

She registered shock. "You, of course!"

That, at least, he believed, and he felt a little guilty for pressing her on the point and looked away. Then he relaxed, shrugged lightly, and lifted his head up. "I'm fine. Really." He even managed a smirk.

"The Klingons had you for almost forty-eight hours," said Cornwell.

"Pleasure cruise," he suggested.

Though the joke was potentially a positive sign, Lorca's history of avoiding processing things suggested it was more likely to be the usual pattern. "Don't do that. Don't shut me out."

He blinked. "What do you want from me, Katrina? You want me to curl up into a ball and cry?"

"That at least would be some sort of reaction commensurate with what you've been through," pointed out Cornwell.

"Well, sorry to disappoint, but I've been through much worse. They didn't break me. Frankly I'm a little offended you thought they would." This wasn't San Francisco. He had no need to convince her of anything. "And you should see the other guy. Seven months he was in that hellhole. Still didn't break him. What happened to me wasn't even a flash in the pan. Barely a tickle." He smirked, confident, jesting.

Somehow Cornwell doubted Lorca's ability to psychologically assess the recovered lieutenant. She equally doubted his ability to assess himself, but there was no way this was being resolved via commlink.

"If you need to talk," began Cornwell earnestly.

"I know exactly who to call." He smiled again.

Cornwell was not reassured in the slightest.

* * *

Lorca checked on Tyler in sickbay and brought him the "traditional welcome aboard gift of Discovery," as he put it, handing Tyler a fortune cookie. Tyler's recovery was going well and he was almost cleared to leave sickbay, which was remarkable given what he had been through. Tyler was a resilient officer. Lorca had already arranged some decent quarters so Tyler could finally sleep in a real bed.

"This ship wasn't even active when I was captured," noted Tyler, still amazed by how much time had gone by during his captivity. It did not feel like seven months so much as one long, unending day. "You have traditions?"

Lorca shrugged. "Might be a little more my tradition than the ship's. It used to be the family business, back when business was a thing." Lorca had a cookie of his own and cracked it. "Ah, this is a good one! 'You don't become a failure until you're satisfied with being one.' As someone who's never satisfied..." Lorca smirked in satisfaction.

Tyler opened his. "Your love life will be happy and harmonious."

Lorca chuckled. "Well, with a face like yours, lieutenant." Tyler's dark, soulful eyes and fine features were probably capable of melting whatever heart he chose to direct them towards.

Tyler smiled faintly and pressed the pieces of cookie to his lips, eating slowly. He was not quite to the point of mustering a real laugh of his own yet, but it was good to hear laughter again after so many months with only screams for company.

"So, you given any thought to what you're going to do next?" asked Lorca.

"Sir?"

Lorca leaned against the side of the biobed. "I don't think anyone would blame you if you used this opportunity to hightail it on out of here. You've certainly been through more than your fair share in this war."

Tyler considered that, his brow furrowing. "I want to stay on, sir. If they'll let me."

"Oh? Is it vengeance you're after, lieutenant? Not that I'd blame you."

Tyler considered that, his brow furrowing. "I don't think so, sir. It's more... if I did leave, then it would be like the Klingons beat me."

Lorca was impressed. It was not just that Tyler had survived so much, but he had come through it with a remarkable resolve and even a degree of introspection where most people might have fallen apart. Whatever he had told himself to get through the long days and nights, it had been enough.

"Someday you'll have to tell me your secret," said Lorca, smiling kindly. Tyler looked confused. "The thing that got you through."

Tyler looked down and away, head shaking faintly. "I don't know, captain, I just... got lucky."

Lorca's smile pulled into an entirely lopsided twist of amusement. Luck alone did not get you through an ordeal like that. Survival on such a level required an innate reserve of strength as rare as a green star. You had to be wily, and determined, and possess the ability to forgive yourself, because otherwise you would go mad.

"We both got lucky," said Lorca. "Wouldn't have made it out of there without you."

"It was good thing you knew how to work that raider," said Tyler. "I didn't learn that in the cell."

"Now that," said Lorca, perking up, "wasn't luck at all. That was preparation."

Tyler looked at Lorca with his big brown eyes, eager to hear more.

Lorca was more than happy to comply. "You have to know your enemy in order to beat them," he said, "and you, Mr. Tyler, know our enemy from the inside. Everything I know is from the out. Between the two of us, we might know everything there is to know about Klingons. Certainly more than any other two people in Starfleet. It'll be a few days yet before there's any chance of you leaving Discovery. I hope, in the interim, you'll do me the favor of letting me pick your brain about our former hosts."

There was the faintest flicker of hesitation. It was true Tyler knew the Klingons more than anyone, but a lot of that knowledge was far too intimate, things he would rather forget. Still, he was Starfleet, and he was determined to make what had happened to him count. "Anything, captain."

Lorca smiled. He had no intention of letting Ash Tyler go anywhere else. He liked Tyler, and the potential he saw there was worthy of cultivation.

* * *

Typically, when Lab 26 called late at night, it was Lalana for their almost-daily discussion. This time it was not.

"O'Malley to Captain Lorca."

From the comfort of his quarters, Lorca considered declining the comm, but he answered.

"I seem to have more beers than I know what to do with. Fancy a drink?"

Lorca snorted. "How about something a little stronger?"

"If you're referring to my emergency anti-claustrophobia supply, then, no."

There was no sign of Lalana and Mischkelovitz in the main lab area. "They're watching this movie Melly likes, Caddy-catsy or something. It's just pictures and music. I can't stand it myself. I'm not particularly fond of music," explained O'Malley as he opened the beers.

Lorca took one. "You don't like * _music_ *," he said with mild incredulity.

"Not really, no. Melly does! Loves it, in fact. She's always got something going in her ears. I'm just glad she spares me the inconvenience." They sat down, O'Malley in Groves' chair and Lorca in Mischkelovitz's. "There is this one song I don't mind. I can't remember what it is, though." With a shrug, O'Malley started on his beer.

"There's no music you enjoy?" said Lorca.

"What about you?" shot back O'Malley.

"Good ol' country boy like me? What do you think."

"How typically American," said O'Malley, rolling his eyes. A moment went by of silent drinking. "How are you, by the way?"

Lorca's eyebrows shot up and he leaned back in the chair. "Cornwell put you up to this?"

"Good god, nothing so formal," said O'Malley, looking genuinely insulted. "It's just, you've been through an ordeal, and if I'd gone through what you had, I'd want a friendly drink or two. Or five, really."

"You wouldn't have survived what I've been through," said Lorca darkly, but as always, there was a macabre sort of humor in it.

O'Malley scowled. "You know, you always make it out like you're some sort of special survivor so much better at it than the rest of us, but the fact of the matter is, you can't say that. You don't know what I've been through, what I've survived."

"So tell me," said Lorca, sipping at the beer.

"You'd like that, would you? An entire lifetime's worth of blackmail material. Sorry, * _leverage_ *. Because you're too good for blackmail, aren't you?"

Lorca started to snicker. "Why the hell would you say that?"

"Oh, so you don't have an inflated opinion of yourself?"

Lorca decided to give O'Malley that one. "Doesn't mean I'm above blackmail."

O'Malley laughed and Lorca chuckled. "Tell you what," said O'Malley. "You can ask me three questions about myself and I'll answer one as a sort of welcome home present."

"How magnanimous," drawled Lorca in a total deadpan.

"I have my moments. Now hurry it up before I change my mind."

The first question Lorca asked was what O'Malley and Mischkelovitz's mother had done to them. This was a clear non-starter, but there was no harm in trying. The second question entailed what an alien with no romantic proclivities saw in O'Malley, because clearly it wasn't looks or personality. The third question was, if he hated John Groves so much, why did he bother looking after him?

"To answer the second," said O'Malley, "she said my blood smelled delicious."

Lorca snorted in amusement, then realized it wasn't a joke. "Seriously?"

"Misellians drink blood. Any blood, really, but I've got a rare type, so why not a delicious walking blood bag anytime you want a snack?" O'Malley smiled to himself. "God, I miss her." He resumed drinking his beer.

It was obvious what Aeree was interested in. What the hell O'Malley got out of his marriage, Lorca couldn't tell. "You let her drink your blood?"

"She's always careful about it, metes it out in quantities that don't cause any lasting harm. I don't love it, but it's not so bad. Here, look." O'Malley pulled his collar loose, unzipped the tunic partway, and revealed a box-shaped scar just below his left collarbone about two inches tall and nearly as wide. There was something odd about the texture of it.

Lorca reached towards O'Malley with a glance of sought permission. O'Malley did not recoil from the advance. Touching his finger to the spot, Lorca discovered the skin felt somehow chitinous, like the membrane of an insect's wing. "What in the..."

"Careful now," warned O'Malley, "if you press it too hard, blood'll come right out. It's a graft, you see, slightly porous biosynthetic material. Beats getting sliced, bitten, and stabbed every time Aeree wants a drink."

In other words, a shunt. Lorca was enthralled by the modification. It was delightfully gross. "And what does she do for a drink when you're not around?" he asked, half-hoping to find out O'Malley's wife was drinking other men behind his back.

"I shudder to think. This is why I can't get a cat." It was said in jest, but the next line out of O'Malley's mouth was entirely somber. "And why it's probably a good thing we can't have children."

There was no denying the longing and regret of that admission. O'Malley wanted children and had sacrificed that desire to live with someone who viewed him as convenient snack. It beggared belief. Lorca said, "You could always adopt."

"I'm not sure taking a child into a household where the mother drinks blood is such a good idea. Mind you we could adopt a Misellian, but then the child would drink my blood, and I don't have enough for two." O'Malley sighed. "Anyway, I've got Melly."

It made a sort of sense. In lieu of a child of his own, an emotionally-stunted kid sister would seem to do the trick. It put O'Malley's unnatural attachment to Mischkelovitz into a slightly changed light. The bond wasn't just sibling, it was also vaguely parental.

"And Mr. Groves," pointed out Lorca.

O'Malley groaned. "I wish I didn't, but it's for his own good. Honestly, if you'd kicked him off Discovery, the loneliness would have killed him."

A shadow crossed Lorca's face. "You said it was Emellia needed him, not the other way around."

"I said what I thought would work in the moment," admitted O'Malley. "And Emellia would be heartbroken to lose another sibling. We all would."

"I didn't realize you lost one already," said Lorca, sympathetic.

O'Malley froze. "We... we don't like to talk about that."

"Fair enough," said Lorca, putting a pin in the subject for the moment. It felt like he had stumbled onto something. He wondered if the family secret was that their mother had killed one of her own children. He pondered the possibility as they sat there drinking. Then Lorca asked, "So, Mac, if I get kidnapped and tortured by Klingons again, you'll answer another question?"

O'Malley lifted an eyebrow. "Try it and see." They both laughed, a good laugh, and despite whatever misgivings Cornwell had and everything else going on in the universe, from where the two of them were sitting, life wasn't so bad.

* * *

Eventually, Mischkelovitz came out of Lalana's room, which was Lorca's opportunity to enter it. He caught a small exchange between the siblings in the process. When Mischkelovitz told O'Malley she loved him, O'Malley replied, "Just as much."

Lalana was pleased to see him in person for the second night in a row. "Tonight you will not be called away to sickbay," she noted.

"That is certainly true." He sprawled out comfortable on her couch, half a beer still in his hand.

They talked. About Ash Tyler and what Lorca saw in him, about Ripper's unceremonious departure and Saru's deception. "Do you know, I think Saru actually thought I intended Ripper harm. It's not like I told him to go all out and risk Ripper to rescue me." He drank the last of the beer and put the glass bottle down on the table.

"No," said Lalana, "that was me."

Lorca blinked in surprise as he leaned back onto the couch and stretched his arms across the back. "You?"

"I told Saru in no uncertain terms he must use any means necessary to retrieve you. I may have suggested Discovery would fall apart if he did not."

"For the record, Lalana? Tyler and I were doing a pretty good job of rescuing ourselves."

"You might have died in the process."

"I'm a survivor," said Lorca. "I'll die when I'm done with the universe, and not a moment sooner."

Lalana slid up next to him on the couch and pressed against his side. "I do wish I could believe that," she said, "but experience has taught me different." She brought her tail up and stroked his cheek.

Lorca smiled. It was strange to think that, once upon a time, he had looked at her and seen something so unforgivably alien it bordered on the incomprehensible. Looking at her now, he saw a person, strange and blue-grey with green eyes that never blinked and could be poked with a finger if he so chose, whose presence made him happy.

"You are different," she said. "Something happened on that Klingon ship."

"Not you, too," said Lorca, thinking of Cornwell accusations. "I'm fine. It wasn't that bad."

Her tongue clicked. "No, not something bad, something good."

"You think being tortured was good?" he chided her lightly.

"I only know what I can see," said Lalana, "and what I see is good."

Lorca reached over and brushed his fingers across the filaments on her head as if they were Mischkelovitz's hair. "What can I say. A little light torture now and again serves to remind a person what's good in life."

He had realized something on the Klingon ship, in that moment when the lights were burning into his retinas and the Klingon captain had tried to guess at who he was. A cosmos full of agonizing light? Maybe so, but it was a pain he would happily endure for the chance to be right where he was, surrounded by monsters he loved.


	65. The Stars, Broken

A/N: Covers the events of episode 6, "Lethe."

Sorry for the delay in posting these latest chapters, writing while rewatching the episodes can be a bit time-consuming, and I've been spending so much time working on the fic, my DVR filled up to 5% and had to be attended to! Rest assured, the delay does not indicate any faltering enthusiasm on my part. We're so close now, the home stretch is nearing, and I'm as excited and determined as ever to see this thing through to the end.

* * *

You could learn a lot about a person in times of peril, and the experience aboard the Klingon prison cruiser had given Lorca a very good measure of Lieutenant Ash Tyler. That measure was only clarified after a round of target practice against holographic projections of Klingon adversaries. Despite staring straight into the faces of his former tormentors, Tyler held himself together well.

Lorca already knew all the facts and figures of Tyler's life from his file. Hearing Tyler tell them himself, the takeaway was that the young lieutenant possessed a potent resilience, that tragedy did not define him, and through it all he maintained a strong, centered sense of self.

Much more telling than any of the biographical details was the fact that, at the end of their target practice, Lorca had racked up twenty-four kills and Tyler reported he'd gotten twenty-two, which was a lie. Tyler's kill count, when Lorca checked, was thirty-six. Tyler started to apologize for the deception. "Don't apologize for excellence!" said Lorca, in a tone that was as much an instruction as a warning that lying to him again was not advisable. Then his tone softened. "I want my chief of security to shoot better than I do."

Seven months in Klingon prison and Tyler had not given up. Instead he had fought, learned, and adapted to survive. Exactly the sort of person Lorca wanted on Discovery and a more than capable replacement for Ellen Landry. Slightly less fun in terms of recreational possibilities, but no one could be everything, and Lorca rather thought he was going to make some inroads on that particular front soon enough without requiring anything of any security chiefs.

* * *

Lorca was in his ready room trying to think of a way to get Discovery into battle "accidentally" when an alert came that Michael Burnham had collapsed in the mess hall. He beamed directly to sickbay, startling Cadet Tilly, who stood at Burnham's side.

"What happened!" Lorca demanded of Tilly, a degree louder than he should have.

"I don't know, sir!" said Tilly. "We just, we sat down to eat, and then she collapsed!"

"I'm reading an abundance of neural activity," said Culber.

Burnham sat suddenly up and shouted, "Sarek!"

Culber quieted Burnham and gently eased her back down onto the biobed.

"What's the matter with her?" asked Lorca, looking to Culber for some sort of clue.

Burnham answered herself. "It's not me, it's Sarek. He's in trouble." Sarek was Burnham's adoptive father, a Vulcan ambassador.

There seemed to be no immediate reason why Sarek being in distress would cause Burnham to collapse. "How do you know that?" asked Lorca.

Burnham explained. The majority of Burnham's past was already known to Lorca. Her parents' deaths, her adoption by Sarek and his wife Amanda, her studies at the Vulcan Science Academy, where she had outperformed all the Vulcans and graduated top of her class. What Lorca did not know was that, as Burnham described it, she shared a piece of Sarek's soul, his _katra_ , which he had infused within her to save her life when she was a child. Now, twenty years later, that link remained. It had even helped Burnham survive the events of the Battle of the Binary Stars.

Now, the link was telling her Sarek was endangered. Burnham looked at Lorca, her face as close to a plea as her Vulcan upbringing allowed it to be. "Captain, help me find him."

Lorca nodded his head. "The full resources of Discovery are at your disposal."

* * *

The first step was finding out where Sarek was and why he was there. Admiral Terral was entirely forthcoming with the details of Sarek's mission. Two Klingon houses, fallen out of favor with the main faction, were offering secret talks to strike a deal with the Federation that had the potential to turn the war in their favor.

But when Lorca suggested Discovery could rescue Sarek before the Starfleet could scramble any other rescue operations, Terral's rejection of the offer was immediate. "Absolutely not. There are protocols to be followed, captain!" Namely, that block Cornwell had put on Discovery actually doing anything.

This was not a battle, this was a rescue operation. There was no good reason for Starfleet to deny Discovery the chance to save a life when there was no real risk to the ship. Most importantly, he had already told Burnham they were going to rescue Sarek.

"You can tell the Vulcans they're welcome, happy to clean up their mess. Discovery out," said Lorca, and closed the channel on Terral.

He reached into the bowl of fortune cookies for a sign as to the likely outcome of this newest insubordination, crushing one between his hands and munching on the remnants. "You are filled up with a sense of urgency. Be patient or you may end up confused," it read.

Lorca twisted the fortune into a tiny curl of paper. The cookie was immaterial. He had already decided on their course of action. The look on Burnham's face was the closest he had seen to true humanity in her, and it was an expression of suffering he did not want to see again. He would endure all the stony-faced, unemotional Vulcan nonsense so long as it meant not having to see her suffer.

Burnham was different than he expected. He had hardly expected her to fall over herself with gratitude at his getting her out of prison, but she had impressed him with a poise and strength entirely unbroken by her conviction and imprisonment. She was like Tyler in that regard. The universe might try to change her, but her inner self was entirely unassailable. She was savvy, too, even if she jumped to conclusions a little too quickly. That quickness was another wonderful trait of hers and it had served her well during the Glenn incident. She hated waiting. So did he.

It was impossible not to admire her. That Starfleet at large had failed to appreciate fully her talents and potential in light of her lone act of informed disobedience was a travesty. There was something amazing about this Michael Burnham, and he intended to make full use of it.

* * *

They scoured the Yridia nebula for signs of Sarek's ship, but it was not along the course it should have been, and the nebula's gases made the warp trail impossible to follow. Lorca sat in his captain's chair fighting the feeling of helpless frustration that came from not having a clear path to resolving the problem.

Burnham arrived on the bridge, looking slightly worse for wear. He was surprised to see her. "How are you feeling?" he asked.

"I still sense Sarek, but it's growing erratic. Think he's getting worse," said Burnham. This was not the question Lorca had asked. It was a little sad how oblivious Burnham was to simple human kindnesses.

"Don't worry," he assured her, "we'll get him back."

But the nebula was immense. Their sensors were ineffective in its radioactive gases and probes could take months. Saru was making little progress on his scans.

More frustration. "Well, any other options, number one?" demanded Lorca.

"Me," said Burnham. When Lorca looked in her eyes, he saw again that fervent devotion and love for her adoptive father.

* * *

The plan was crazy, but it was the sort of thing that just might be crazy enough to work. Lorca accompanied Burnham down towards the engineering lab to pitch it to Stamets. Mischkelovitz would have been a better choice, but no way was Lorca going to make the mistake of trying to put Burnham and Mischkelovitz together on a project. Mischkelovitz was useless if she crawled back into the walls.

In the turbolift, Burnham suddenly staggered slightly as if dizzy and Lorca caught her arm to steady her. "Halt turbolift," he barked to the computer, and asked Burnham a second time, "you okay there, Michael?"

"Sarek is..."

"Not Sarek," he said, "you."

Burnham straightened with one hand on the wall of the turbolift, pulling slightly away from him as she did, and he released her. Something seemed to say that, even if there was good reason for him to have taken her arm, she did not appreciate the gesture on any level and it was as unwanted as it was unexpected.

"We're wasting time," said Burnham. "Computer, resume turbolift." Lorca had not issued a command lockout and the computer responded to Burnham's command.

"You know, it's all right to be human," said Lorca as the doors opened. He saw a momentary hesitation on Burnham's face in response, but then it was replaced by that steely, faux-emotionless mask she wore and she strode out of the turbolift and he followed.

"As any Vulcan will tell you, simply because I was raised according to Vulcan teachings does not change the fact I _am_ human," Burnham declared as they walked down the hall.

 _Could've fooled me_ , thought Lorca, but bit his tongue.

Stamets was, oddly enough, happy to see them.

"You're talking about building a synthetic mind-meld augment," he exclaimed upon hearing Burnham's proposal. "Groovy!"

"Clearly your trip down the mycelium path has lightened your mood, lieutenant," observed Lorca with a touch of wry amusement.

Normally, this sort of jibe would have elicited some sort of obstinate pushback from Stamets, but today, the astromycologist smiled benevolently at Lorca. "Once you're past getting stabbed by needles, it's pretty great!"

Lorca narrowed his eyes in assessment. Since when did Stamets have a sense of humor?

At least one thing hadn't changed. Stamets responded to this revelation about the Vulcan katra with excitement for the pure research opportunities of such a network, immediately enchanted by the possibilities and threatening to go off on a scientific tangent. Lorca directed him back to the task at hand with the firm admonition that there was no time for them to explore the metaphysical implications of Vulcan katras. Sarek was out there in that nebula and they needed him, now.

The only problem was, for this plan to work, they would need to put Burnham inside the nebula. The radioactive interference was not just a problem for the ship's sensors, but also Burnham's connection to Sarek. Lorca relentlessly shot back at every problem Stamets presented with attempts to find solutions. "So we take the Discovery inside the nebula and get closer to him."

"Ooh, bad idea," said Stamets delightedly. "Guess what happens if we mix those cosmic gases with the concentration of mycelium spores we have on board?"

"Um," said Lorca, staring at Stamets and wondering if maybe Stamets had taken something before starting his shift. Perhaps tetrahydrocannabinol concentrate. He might need to check the security feeds later to see if Stamets had started eating his precious mushrooms.

Stamets imitated an explosion. Then, he looked at Lorca knowingly and said, "I know, I know, get to work."

Lorca stared after Stamets as Burnham rattled off some mission specifications. Stamets had just willingly set himself to do the actual task he had been assigned to do. What in the hell was happening. There might actually be something seriously wrong with Stamets. Whatever it was, it seemed like an improvement. Lorca found he actually sort of liked Stamets now.

He was only half-listening, still perplexed by this complete change in Stamets' personality, but he heard Burnham request Cadet Tilly's assistance and promised her whatever she wanted or needed for this mission. He gave her Tyler for a pilot, too, and before sending them off he pulled Tyler aside on the shuttle and said, "Bring her back in one piece."

"Not a scratch," promised Tyler, patting the shuttle's controls, and Lorca's smile softened.

"I'm talking about her," Lorca clarified, glancing over at Burnham, and then offered Tyler a piece of his trademark gallows humor: "Or don't come back at all." As usual, despite the smile, there was something very real in those words.

* * *

Finding himself in yet another one of those depressing waiting patterns while Burnham flew off to save her adoptive father, Lorca examined the latest iteration of Mischkelovitz's mycelial map from the privacy of his quarters. It was coming along slowly but surely. Each jump added something new, some detail, some revision, some elimination of a previous possibility.

Unfortunately, with an absolute dearth of reasons for them to jump anywhere at the moment, there was really nothing Mischkelovitz could add to the map, so she was back on the Klingon cloaking problem.

An alert from the bridge interrupted his examination. Admiral Cornwell wanted to talk to him.

In person. Her cruiser was here. This, he knew, was not going to be good.

It was even worse than he expected. Cornwell wasn't just mad, she was furious, because the rampant insubordination she had been putting up with for far too long had just spread to his interactions with other admirals.

"You are captain of the most advanced ship in the fleet. The cornerstone of our entire defense against the Klingons!" she proclaimed, her every word a judgmental reprimand. (Could Cornwell even hear herself? Yet again, Lorca was reminded of the fact they would not let him deploy Discovery in battle where it was truly needed. Was the cornerstone of their defense supposed to be empty air?) Her accusations went on and on: he had launched an unauthorized rescue mission with a convicted mutineer and a POW of questionable trustworthiness (unfair; Tyler had proven himself both true and capable to Lorca), he was treating Discovery like his own fiefdom (fair; as far as Lorca was concerned, the ship was), Stamets had engaged in illegal eugenics modifications (but he had gotten the spore drive working in the process and saved everyone on the ship). "There are rules—"

"Rules are for admirals in back offices," he said to her, face set with fierce determination. "I'm out there trying to win a war."

"Then don't make enemies on your own side!"

As strained as things had become, he was stunned by the implication she might now be in some way his enemy. "What are you doing here? What's really going on?"

"I came to see my friend," she said.

There were two ways Lorca could interpret that. One way was to challenge whether or not she truly understood the meaning of the word, because these days he was no longer sure.

He went with the other. "Okay," he said softly, and decided to remind her exactly what sort of friends they were. "Why don't we stop talking like Starfleet officers, Kat, and, ah, start talking like friends?" He produced a bottle of whiskey from under the table and offered a tiny smile of invitation.

He could see the reluctance, but also the hope.

"If you don't want to, that's fine. But it's the end of my day, and it's been a long one, so..." He put a glass on the table next to the bottle and poured himself a measure.

Cornwell stared at the alcohol as it went in the glass. "There are better ways to unwind," she said.

Lorca picked up the drink with a smirk. "Are you offering?"

"Reading, music," corrected Cornwell, kicking herself slightly for walking right into that one.

He took a sip of the whiskey, felt the initial bite of the alcohol dissolve into a smoothly satisfying, earthy warmth, and put a second glass on the table. "You gonna make me drink alone?" Her will to resist dissolved a little more with each passing moment, but she was still not at the tipping point. "You came an awful long way to see me. These days, there's no telling when either of us'll get a chance like this again, to share a drink with a friend."

He said when, but they both knew full well that he could just as well have said "if" and the statement would have been just as if not more true. She stepped forward and he poured her drink. A little more than he should have, so he poured some more in his own glass to balance things out.

"I really hate how we left things on that starbase," said Cornwell.

"Yeah," said Lorca. "Me, too." He sighed and took another sip, leaning his free hand on the surface of his desk.

Cornwell tilted the glass in her hand, admired the amber color. "This war has made things difficult in more ways than I think any of us expected."

"That it has." He watched her take a slow sip of her whiskey. "Do you mind if we adjourn to a more comfortable setting?" She shrugged at him faintly, not saying no. He picked up the bottle. "Computer, two for site to site transport. Captain's quarters."

He closed his eyes as they rematerialized in a shimmer of white light.

"I still can't believe you won't get your damn eyes fixed," she said.

"They're _my_ damn eyes," he said. "And I—"

"You're keeping them, I remember." She rolled her eyes at him and sat down on the chair next to the coffee table. Intentionally, because it only had room for one and kept this encounter more firmly on her terms. He sat on the couch across from her and put the bottle on the table, clinking his glass against hers. "Nothing like a single malt, straight from the motherland."

She recalled a bottle of the same they had once shared while watching the Perseid meteor shower. Lorca smiled at her as she reminisced, but somehow it felt less than fully genuine and slightly distracted.

"We were so young, with grand plans for the future," she said, and lifted her glass with a faintly giddy motion.

"Well, some of us still have," he boasted.

"I know," she said, and sat there, looking at him intently. Her face shifted from the fond sweetness of distant memories to the sharp focus of the here and now. "I worry about you, Gabriel. Some of the decisions you've been making recently have been troubling." She said it with a small laugh, but Lorca could see she was not joking.

"Well, war doesn't provide too many opportunities for niceties," he countered, and framed his response just as jokingly in the hopes of eliciting more of the same.

Instead, the levity evaporated on her side of the conversation. She began to list off some of her concerns: the way he pushed his crew, his recent disregard of Starfleet's orders, of _her_ orders. To him these were mild rebukes. To her, they were serious questions as to what he thought he was doing out here in the reaches.

"Starfleet needs you at your best," she said, trying to soften the blow with a return to a more lighthearted tone. "I'm not sure we're getting it."

"I'm not sure the Klingons would agree," he said with a smirk, raising his glass to his lips, still stalwartly dismissive. Besides, if the Klingons were getting less than his best, it was only because Cornwell kept trying to tie his hands behind his back and stop him from doing what he knew was needed.

"I don't think you've been the same since the Buran."

There it was, of course. Lorca shook his head and chuckled faintly. If this were a drinking game, he would have lost right then and there, because it always, always came back to the Buran. Predictable to a fault. He leaned forward, reminded her he had passed every test, every psych eval, and she admitted that was true. "So what's really the problem?" he asked.

"Less than a week ago, you were being tortured. Now you're back in the chair. How do you feel about that?"

He laughed. They had a bottle of single malt, they were in his quarters, and she was dime store psychoanalyzing him with the greatest known cliché of her profession. "Are we in session?" He put his glass down, shifted his position so he was sitting on the edge of the couch, and leaned in even closer. "'Cause if I have your undivided attention for fifty minutes, I can think of a whole bunch of other things we can be doing." His hand reached over and touched her knee, fingers lightly tracing the fabric of her uniform.

She could not help but smile. Between the alcohol, those clear blue eyes, that devilish smirk, the relentless pursuit and focus that accompanied it, and the way he did everything in carefully-calculated escalating steps to get exactly what he wanted, it was like twenty years ago all over again.

Cornwell stood up, removed her insignia, and put it on the table. The signal was clear. As of right now, she was no longer an admiral, they were just two people in a room with a bottle of single malt.

* * *

Fifty minutes turned out to be an exhausting goal. Which wasn't to say that it wasn't fun, and that Lorca didn't enjoy every minute of it, but after a very long day and in the blissfully exhausted satisfaction following, he drifted off into an almost happy sleep.

He awoke to the sensation of something touching the triangular-shaped scar upon his back and with the loss of his sleep state came a surge of panicked adrenaline.

For a moment, he was not on Discovery, he was somewhere else entirely, and it terrified him beyond anything. He instinctively felt someone was trying to kill him. His fingers were already wrapped tightly around the phaser under his pillow and he rolled over onto his perceived attacker with the phaser drawn. His other hand closed around her neck as the phaser pressed against her chin. His breaths were a series of rapid, panicked pants of overwhelmed anxiety.

He saw Cornwell. He was still on Discovery. He looked at the phaser in his own hand almost incomprehensibly. It was hard to tell which of them was more shocked, her for the phaser pointing at her face, or him for the realization he had drawn it on her.

He released her, tried to calm the wrongness of the moment. "I'm sorry," he gasped.

Cornwell pushed him off her, jumping out of the bed. "You sleep with a phaser in your bed and you say nothing's wrong!" she exclaimed.

"Kat!"

She grabbed her clothes, frantically pulling them on. "I have ignored the signs. I can't any more."

He listened with rising alarm as she decried him as a stranger, a liar, someone who had changed in ways that made him unrecognizable to her. He watched the anger and fear on her face and was helpless to stave off the deluge of condemnation. She said, "Now I see it's worse than I ever thought. Your behavior's pathological. That's what tonight was, right? Trying to get me to back off?"

She was fully dressed now. She picked up her insignia from the table and clapped it back onto her uniform.

"I can't leave Starfleet's most powerful weapon in the hands of a broken man."

She went for the door.

For all that he had been scared upon waking, his was even more terrified now. He scrambled from the bed after her, stopping short of reaching for her, because it was impossible for him to unmake her memory of his hand around her neck and he had no wish to reconjure it for either of them. His voice cracked as he pleaded with her, "Don't take my ship away from me! She's all I got. Please, I'm begging you." She did not respond to this. Lorca changed tactics, attempted to give her what he thought she wanted. "And you're, you're right. It's been harder on me than I let on, I lied about everything and I need help."

He stood there, completely exposed, desperately looking for some sign of forgiveness or understanding or compassion that would signify she was not really going to take Discovery from him. She was supposed to be his friend, she kept insisting she was, and he needed this ship because it was his everything.

"I hate that I can't tell if this is really you," she said, unmoved.

The look on his face was so lost, so scared. She left him standing there like that. As the doors closed, he felt like the universe was about to come crashing down on top of him.

It surely would have had not the comm beeped a priority message from the bridge. It was Saru, reporting the return of Burnham with Sarek. Lorca tried to process this news and everything that had just unraveled around him. "On my way to sickbay," he said, a tremor in his voice.

He had thought she would be putty in his hands, but he'd squeezed too hard, and it had slipped right through his fingers.

* * *

Cornwell beelined to Lab 26, not caring if Lorca tracked her movements at this point, intent on ending this farce once and for all and making sure everyone she held responsible for this mess knew they had played a part in it.

O'Malley was outside the door alongside the big Swedish man who had served with Lorca on the Triton and whose name Cornwell did not remember. "Colonel, with me!" she barked, and O'Malley followed her into the lab, not certain what was going on. He found Cornwell entirely not in the mood for small talk as the doors cycled them inside.

Mischkelovitz was startled to see Cornwell come through with O'Malley and beeline for Lalana's room. Lalana was similarly surprised to find Cornwell on her doorstep. Cornwell did not bother to wait for an invitation. She charged straight in and O'Malley trailed after in a continued state of confusion.

Lalana was typically cheerful in her greeting to Cornwell, but as the door slid shut, Cornwell was not having any of it.

"You told me you would tell me if there was something wrong with him," Cornwell said. "There is something _very_ wrong with him!"

"What are you talking about?" asked Lalana, beginning to knock her hands together.

"Come again?" said O'Malley, confused for more reasons than the fact that he had not been privy to the referenced conversation between Cornwell and Lalana.

"After the Buran!" clarified Cornwell, repeating, "You said you would tell me if there was anything wrong with him."

Lalana tilted her head. "That may be what you heard, but that is not what I said."

Cornwell stared, aghast. "Excuse me?"

Lalana's hands stilled. "I told you I would look after him and let you know if there was anything of concern about Hayliel."

Cornwell breathed in, shaking from the combination of anger and adrenaline she was still feeling. It suddenly seemed very important, the exact words Lalana had used in San Francisco, but Cornwell could not remember precisely what they were. "Don't you dare try to downplay this with word games."

"Words are not games," said Lalana. "Words are the most important things humans have because words are used to tell stories."

Cornwell was utterly flabbergasted. After all these years, Lalana remained unmistakably alien and the limited extent to which she understood humanity had clearly failed both Cornwell and Lorca in the most spectacular and unfortunate fashion. "There is something very, _very_ wrong. That is not the Gabriel Lorca I know."

O'Malley began to wonder what he was doing in the room. Bearing witness in the event of legal proceedings? Preventing one of Lorca's lovers from murdering the other?

"There is nothing wrong with him," said Lalana. "He is exactly who he is."

Cornwell exploded. " _He pulled a phaser on me!_ "

O'Malley's mouth fell open in shock. "What? Who?" He did not mean to ask who, because it was entirely self-evident who they were talking about, but O'Malley could not believe it. Cornwell shot O'Malley a look that said his momentary obtuseness was extremely not appreciated and O'Malley hastily replaced it with another question. "Why?"

"Is there a _good_ reason for a captain to draw a phaser on an admiral? _"_

There were, in O'Malley's experience, several. Admirals were not immune to mistakes and corruption, even if their shortcomings tended to be slightly above his colloquial pay grade. He tried again to elicit an answer that would make sense of this horrifying information. "Why on earth would he do that?"

Cornwell did not appreciate the colonel's questions. It felt like he was interrogating her and from her perspective, the reasons for the offense were not so important as the fact it had happened in the first place. "You tell me. I sent you here to assess him, colonel, and you're telling me you missed that?"

"I—" O'Malley was really struggling with this. "I don't know what you're talking about! He's never pulled a phaser on me. Nor anyone on the crew so far as I know. Why would he? What the hell happened?" Lorca had not even pulled a phaser on Groves, despite having more than ample motivation to do so.

"It was under his pillow," said Cornwell.

"His... His pillow? His..." O'Malley paled, making his freckles stand out in sharp relief. He seemed to come to a full and total stop and stared at Cornwell with a vacant expression on his face.

It was clear what facet of this exchange O'Malley was now processing. "You're focusing on the wrong thing," said Cornwell bluntly.

"No, you are focusing on the wrong thing," said Lalana. "Why are you upset? He did not shoot you. There is nothing for you to be upset about because there is no problem."

Neither human could quite believe their ears. Lalana had yet again found a way to thoroughly demonstrate her utter lack of human morality in a horrifying way.

"We need to remove him from command at the earliest opportunity," said Cornwell. "I'm authorizing you to arrest him."

O'Malley shook his head, mostly to get rid of the idea that Lalana thought pointing phasers at people was no big deal. He focused his attention on Cornwell. "With all due respect, I can't possibly do anything of the sort without conducting a proper investigation. This is a very serious accusation, admiral."

"Accusation?" repeated Cornwell. "I'm telling you what _happened_." She jerked her head as she said this, emphasizing the bitter truth.

"If I ask Captain Lorca, will he tell me the same?"

"Are you really turning this into a he said, she said situation?" said Cornwell. "I am an _admiral_ and I just had a phaser pulled on me by a man who is completely unfit for command." She was really getting tired of repeating herself for them both. How O'Malley could possible stand there and not immediately declare Lorca in need of arrest, Cornwell did not know.

" _Vice_ admiral," said O'Malley automatically, meaning it only as a technical clarification and not a disparagement, but it came off that way all the same. "And I'm a colonel in Investigative Services. Admiral, I cannot eschew my duties based on the word of anyone. This is literally the foundation of what Investigative Services is built upon. Now, if you want to remove him through command channels, that's entirely your prerogative, but I do not make arrests until after I have investigated the events in question." (There was one exception, if the suspect in question posed a flight risk, but in this instance, Lorca was less likely to flee Discovery than to flee with the ship and O'Malley on it.)

Cornwell could hardly believe what she was hearing, wondering how O'Malley could possibly downplay the magnitude of Lorca's transgression, but O'Malley wasn't done.

"Which isn't to say I won't investigate, I certainly will. I'll take your statement into consideration, and his statement, and, if the evidence bears up, which I should think it would because I do place great importance on your statement and I certainly don't question it, then and only then will I arrest him. But the man has a regulatory right to defend himself and respond, and I'm not the person to strip away anyone's right to a defense." This right to defense was the only thing that had saved his sister.

Cornwell chewed her lip. She was slightly concerned about the optics of removing Lorca in the middle of a warzone and O'Malley was going to adhere to his protocols. There was also the issue that there was no telling how Lorca or his crew would respond to an attempt to remove Lorca by force. The look on Lorca's face when she left him had been that of a cornered animal, and in Cornwell's experience, cornered animals were the most dangerous kind.

Lalana's tail twitched back and forth in catlike agitation. "If you are quite done, you may leave my home now, admiral."

The look Cornwell gave Lalana would have withered anyone else, but it had no effect on the lului. "I should never have trusted you," Cornwell said.

"I believe the human phrase 'you have made your own bed and now you must lie in it' may apply," said Lalana, "as it seems your own bed would have been a better place for you to lie down than in Gabriel's." She had the audacity to click her tongue once.

"Fuck you," said Cornwell, turning on her heel, and left. O'Malley trailed after Cornwell again, offering Lalana one last confused glance as he did.

"I want full updates on everything in your investigation," said Cornwell as they bypassed Mischkelovitz once more.

"With respect, admiral, as you are a part of the investigation, it wouldn't be right for you to be involved to that degree. I'll direct my findings to my superior and she'll be in contact as needed."

"Fine, but don't wait," said Cornwell, and strode away, leaving O'Malley standing next to Larsson.

Larsson watched the admiral go. "What was that about?"

O'Malley just shook his head. "I have no bloody idea, but I'm damn sure going to find out."

* * *

Standing in the hallway with Burnham, Lorca looked at the figure of Sarek lying in sickbay, but he was only halfway attentive to the issue of the unconscious Vulcan ambassador. Part of Lorca was still back in his quarters having everything stripped away from him.

The talks Sarek had been delayed from attending represented a very real chance for the Federation to hold its own and even turn the tide of this war. Sarek was never going to make the meeting in his present state.

"The window for the talks closes in a few hours. Even if the Federation wanted to step in, they couldn't get there in time," said Burnham.

As she spoke, the wheels turned in Lorca's head. There were so many things up in the air right now and he was barely keeping it together, not that Burnham seemed to notice. Her appreciation of human emotions was largely stunted because of the Vulcan lying on the biobed.

Something slightly mad occurred to Lorca. "Admiral Cornwell could." He could scarcely believe he was saying it. "I know her. She'd do anything to keep the chance of peace alive."

Even if Cornwell had lost all faith in him, decided he was a stranger, and was now trying to ruin his life, this war was too important and he was not going to take away any hope the Federation had of surviving it. Even if it meant giving someone who was actively trying to destroy him a feather in her cap.

It might actually play in his favor, show Cornwell that he was still worthy of his command because he could appreciate the bigger picture. Make her see the bigger picture, too.

Burnham turned to Lorca. Her expression was still so steely. "Sir, you didn't have to mount this rescue mission for Sarek."

"I didn't do it for him," said Lorca, and for a moment there was something gentle in his eyes. "I need a team around me that's gonna help me carry the day. And that includes you." If he was going to find a way to keep Discovery, he would need such a team more than ever.

"I'm grateful," she said, "to serve under a captain like you." He smiled, nodded, and left her to watch over her father.

This was a shit day, but at least he had managed to make good on one miracle. Time to try for another.

* * *

There was precious little time to waste, so even though he received a message requesting his presence at Lab 26 urgently, he went to the actual guest quarters Cornwell had been assigned. She was gathering up the handful of personal effects that had been transferred over from her cruiser, namely a toothbrush and change of clothes.

She was not pleased to see him again this soon. "You have a lot of nerve—"

"The talks on Cancri IV," he said quickly, aware he had to get as much information out before she tried to cut him off or close the door on his face. "Sarek can't make it. No one can, except you. We're halfway there already."

She stared.

The helplessness filtered onto his face once again. "Kat, please. I'm sorry, but this is bigger than either of us."

"You're goddamn right it is," she said, and meant it on two counts. These talks were a real and tangible chance for her to make a difference in the greater scheme of things. Then there was also the fact his command of Discovery was never intended as a personal favor, it was supposed to be for the good of Starfleet, and she no longer believed at all that it was.

He recognized she was agreeing to attend the talks, which was good news, but he had to keep trying to save himself. "And when you're back, then we can..."

"It won't change anything."

He stood there, breathing shallowly. "A bit of perspective might—"

Her eyes were cold and her voice was unyielding. "You're only delaying the inevitable."

"Just tell me what to say to fix this!" His voice rose, startling an ensign at the far end of the corridor. "I'm trying to do what's right. For the greater good." If only he could make her realize how much that applied to his captaincy of Discovery.

"I can see that you believe that," said Cornwell, and closed the door.

* * *

There was still the request for him at Lab 26, but he ignored it for the moment, instead focusing on preparing supplies and a shuttle for Cornwell's departure. This gave him an excuse to be in the shuttlebay when Cornwell turned up.

One last try. "I'm sorry," he said. "It's unforgivable, I know, but please don't ruin me because of one night."

"I don't want to ruin your career," she told him, intended it as a reassurance. "But when I return, we'll talk about how you step down. And after you get some help, maybe we'll get you back in that chair."

There were a lot of words in that Lorca did not like. _Step down_ , _maybe_ , and even _help_. He bit back anything that would give her more ammunition to destroy him with and said simply, "May fortune favor the bold, admiral. Good luck with your negotiation." He did not wait around to watch the shuttle launch.

He had a destination in mind but he did not reach it. O'Malley appeared in his path. "Captain, a word?"

"Not now, colonel," said Lorca.

"Yes, now," said O'Malley, and Lorca swallowed, because he knew O'Malley had a connection to Cornwell and had a pretty good guess as to what this conversation was going to be about. "We can go wherever you like, but we are talking right now."

Lorca chose his ready room, as he always did, thinking as they walked towards it how he was going to get out of this seemingly impossible situation. Was he at the point now where he had to be figuring out how to neutralize threats he had thought were his allies?

The dimness of the ready room was comforting and more so the stars, but Lorca was tense and jumpy as the doors closed. He prepared to attempt to defend himself from O'Malley, but before he could, O'Malley spoke.

O'Malley's voice was surprisingly soft. "I heard what happened with Cornwell. Are you all right?"

It was not a demand for explanation but the same question Lorca had asked Burnham, and offered with the same intent. There was nothing in O'Malley's stance or expression that suggested he was here in an official capacity, and everything to suggest he was here as a friend. That thing Cornwell kept claiming to be.

Still. "What, so you can rat me out to her?" Lorca asked, eyes wide. He wanted to sneer but his mouth was not quite managing it.

"I wouldn't rat you out to Cornwell if she paid me in cheese," said O'Malley, entirely serious and sincere despite the ridiculousness of the words.

Some part of Lorca still worried this was some sort of trap or trick, but he decided to take a chance on O'Malley. His head shook back and forth in small, repetitive denial and his face took on the same hopeless and lost expression it had worn when Cornwell left his quarters. It was an expression he had been struggling to contain ever since that moment. "Mac," he said, and swallowed. "I fucked up." His mouth twisted into an anguished grimace. "Big." Lorca closed his eyes and covered them with his hand, then dropped his hand and turned to look at the stars. It felt like he was on the verge of losing everything that mattered to him right now.

They did not have the sort of relationship that permitted one man to hug another, but O'Malley moved to join Lorca at the window, his freckles reflected in the windowpane, dark specks on pale in a perfect inversion of the spacescape.

"Tell me what happened, in as much detail as you can, and don't leave anything out."

Lorca discovered that, as much as O'Malley was a great talker, he was an even better listener. Patient, attentive, sympathetic. He did request clarification on a few points: "I thought you were sleeping with Commander Landry."

There were a lot of jokes Lorca could have made in reply and he managed to muster up the capacity for absolutely none of them. "There was no actual sleep involved," he said blandly.

"And Lalana?"

"I don't bring a phaser in her room," said Lorca. Being restricted to the lab, Lalana had never been to his quarters on Discovery.

"But you keep one in yours."

"It helps me sleep!" managed Lorca, but even though it was true, it sounded pathetic to them both. "I can't lose my ship, Mac." Lorca's face twisted into an expression so pitiful he looked away from the window so he would not see his own reflection.

O'Malley could see clearly how devastated Lorca was by that possibility, but he would not and could not lie to Lorca. "Gabriel, I'm not sure you have a choice. But it may not be as bad as it looks. Certainly you're among the best tacticians, in a moment when we happen to need that area of expertise. It may be possible for this action to be deferred, at least for the time being, and then we can sort it out after the war."

"If that's the case, then I don't want this war to end," said Lorca bitterly.

"You don't mean that," said O'Malley, but Lorca did mean it a little bit. "You're just lashing out, and understandably. Look, put it to you this way, if it comes out that a war hero has been under a lot of stress and needs some time after the war, no one would judge you in the slightest. It's just a matter of us all getting to that point so everyone can appreciate it. Cornwell isn't the absolute authority of all things Starfleet, she's just your direct supervisor, and from what I can see, that relationship is well and truly compromised. Step one, have Cornwell removed from supervising you. We'll start there."

Lorca almost smiled at that. He had been hoping sleeping with Cornwell would demonstrate to her he was perfectly fine, but now that it had blown up in his face, at least there was still some tactical advantage to the event. It reflected poorly on her, too. Not as badly as it did him given how it ended, but still.

"I don't understand one thing," said O'Malley. "We finally have Stamets acting as a pilot for the drive and it makes the whole thing tenable, but they haven't rolled the technology out even now that we don't need the tardigrade?"

There was something infinitely calming about being directed away from thinking about the pending loss of command and back to the usual set of problems.

"It was a eugenics augmentation," said Lorca. "I don't think Cornwell wants that getting out, and we don't have any more tardigrade DNA to merge into another human." That was another thing Saru might have considered before letting Burnham and Tilly release Ripper, but it was too late now.

O'Malley sighed heavily. "How much simpler my life would be if we didn't have this unilateral ban on genetic engineering."

* * *

He finally made it to Lalana. "Something happened," was how Lorca began the conversation, and Lalana listened with just as much attentiveness as O'Malley had, but with fewer interruptions. "There's a chance..." It was hard to say it, even now. "They might take Discovery from me."

Lalana did not hesitate. "Then don't let them. You are most yourself when you are on a ship. You belong here. Don't let them take it from you."

His look was one of utter helplessness. "I might not have a choice." There was no guarantee any part of O'Malley's thought process would actually work. It largely depending on him finding an ally in Starfleet higher-ranking than Cornwell, and the only other admiral he had any particular working relationship with at the moment was Terral, whom he'd angered by rescuing Sarek, in so much as Vulcans could be angered. "Maybe your friends in Starfleet?"

"I will ask," said Lalana, and cupped the side of his face with the broad end of her tail. "I was given the stars by this face. I have not forgotten that. You will always be the man with stars in his eyes to me."

* * *

Saru woke Lorca from his bed. Aware his first officer might be coming to try and remove him from command, Lorca slipped the phaser under his pillow into the band of his trousers, hidden at his back, and answered the door.

The news was something else entirely.

"It was a trap, sir. The Klingons have taken the admiral."

The Klingons' invitation to talk had been a ruse from the beginning. The Klingon houses in question had not split off from the main leadership, they were looking to hook a fish to curry prestige and favor. In lieu of the high-ranking Vulcan they had expected, a human admiral from Starfleet made just as good a prize.

"Notify Starfleet Command," ordered Lorca. "Ask for orders."

Saru's head turned, indicating confusion.

"Is there a problem?" asked Lorca.

"No, sir, uh... Just, in the past, we have engaged in alternative thinking on these matters."

"What if we go after her and it's another trap, Mr. Saru? Did you consider that? Starfleet can't afford to lose the Discovery. She's bigger than all of us. If so ordered, we will try and rescue the admiral, but not without authorization."

"I will hail Starfleet now, sir," said Saru.

Lorca closed the door and went to the window, looking out at the stars.

It was everything Admiral Cornwell had ever wanted from him. Obedience, caution, and adherence down to the letter of the regulations.

She could choke on it. It seemed fate had given him a second chance.


	66. Past and Present Tense

A/N: This chapter cover the events of episode 7, "Magic to Make the Sanest Man Go Mad." Also, revised a paragraph in chapter 61 – Ctrl-F "bitter" for the new edition. I had already written that bit months ago, but it accidentally got punted into the prewritten section of this chapter and I just found it again. Just a little echo of a ghost from the past... (You may have already read the revised paragraph depending.)

Also, the fortune that is drawn in this chapter was 100% a random, "pick one and use it" draw that just happened to be unbelievably and unforgivably apropos to the theme. I was so shocked I forgot the sentence I was in the middle of writing when I opened it. Apparently, fate wants me to write this fanfic just as much as it wants Lorca to stay in command of his ship.

Finally, this is a long chapter. I considered splitting it, but there didn't seem a point where it made sense to. I give you an (overly) extended look into the antics of non-Michael Burnham characters during the episode.

* * *

O'Malley came to the bridge, which was unusual, and Lorca spoke to him in the ready room again. The colonel was as high-strung and judgmental as ever. He crossed his arms as he stood across from Lorca and declined a fortune cookie.

"Am I to understand Admiral Cornwell's been taken by Klingons and we're _not_ going to rescue her?"

"Those are not our orders," said Lorca smoothly.

"So, Cornwell ordered us to rescue you, and we did, and then our orders were not to rescue Sarek, but we did that anyway, and now our orders are not to rescue Cornwell and we're suddenly doing what Starfleet Command wants?"

Lorca crossed his arms and narrowed his eyes. This was much the same as Saru's objection, but Saru was not so fearless as to pose these objections in the form of an argument to Lorca directly. "We're here to win a war, not rescue every lost soul."

"Well you damn well could've fooled me as that's largely what we've been doing these past six months. You personally, might I add."

"I thought you didn't like Cornwell," pointed out Lorca.

"I don't, but that doesn't mean I want her tortured by Klingons."

"I was tortured by Klingons. It wasn't so bad."

O'Malley's mouth fell open and his arms uncrossed. "Gabriel!" For a moment, O'Malley sounded like Lorca's mother might have, had she been prone to chastising Lorca in the tone of a sixty-year-old British woman.

"Look," said Lorca, dropping the levity. "This is what Cornwell would have wanted. Following the rules and waiting for orders. She's spent most of the past six months telling me to do just that."

"You've picked an awfully convenient time to start doing what Cornwell wants."

Lorca stared. "Are we going to have a problem here, colonel?"

O'Malley exhaled and shook his head softly. "I'm just very disappointed in you, is all." He stood in silent consideration for a moment. "You know, I've mostly agreed with everything you've done up till now. Usually you do to the right thing, just in the wrong way, and for the first time I find you doing the wrong thing in the right way and I honestly don't know what to make of it. I don't like what it says about you as a person that you'd let one of your oldest friends suffer like this simply for the purposes of keeping your ship."

"She _was_ my friend," said Lorca. "Past tense. And out of respect for that, we are following Starfleet's orders." Each of the last few words was said with pointed emphasis indicating Lorca had no interest in being further argued with on this subject.

"If you're going to be like this, then perhaps you'd better count me in the past tense as well."

They stared at each other, neither backing down. Then something occurred to Lorca and he scowled in disgust and looked away.

O'Malley squinted at him. "What's that look for?"

"What look?"

"That look on your face right now."

"I don't know, Mac, why don't you tell me what it looks like."

"If I knew that would I be asking?" They were going in circles.

Lorca broke the pattern. He clenched his jaw in anger directed mostly at himself. "I suppose now you're gonna take up Cornwell's cause." Worse, he had given O'Malley enough ammunition to do just that. His intent in the telling had been to make O'Malley see his side, take his side, and it had worked, but now Lorca was uncertain where O'Malley's loyalties lay: with his principles, or with Lorca himself.

O'Malley looked insulted. "What? I'm disappointed in you, I'm not going to betray you. I know how hard it was for you to tell me any of what you did. I'm certainly not going to use it against you. It'd destroy my reputation, for starters." O'Malley sighed. "Just give me some time, will you? I need to process this."

O'Malley left the ready room. Lorca took a fortune cookie and crushed it in his hand, eating the pieces and dropping the paper unread into the trash. He quietly put a hold on any and all outbound communications from O'Malley and Allan, just in case. In doing so, Lorca noticed Allan had not sent or received a single transmission in all his time on Discovery. Unusual.

* * *

As Culber was not permitted into Lab 26, he had to wait outside with Allan for Mischkelovitz to emerge. When she did, she looked at Culber with obvious suspicion as to what he was doing on her doorstep.

Culber managed to be as friendly, cheerful, and charming as anyone could be, especially given the adversarial stance Mischkelovitz had taken. "Dr. Mischkelovitz, I was wondering if you could help me with something?"

All that charm and she still looked at him like he had three heads and two of them were shooting fire at her. "Pel'tra kas-kotiin kelmatro sai-on," she said darkly.

Culber had no idea how to respond to that.

Standing behind her, Allan apparently did. "Melly," he said, "je kranna kos'bri-kaa. Se patro kii'kay'an?"

Mischkelovitz turned to him. "Je mohs ke'barato, se patriik maroten."

Allan replied, "Kesse na iil me trohs baraal. Pelta!" Then he smiled at Mischkelovitz.

With a scowl, Mischkelovitz said, "Fine, Lan! But only because you asked." She turned back to Culber. "What do you want?"

* * *

Her eyes lit up when she saw the design of the implant. "Ah!" she went. "This is terrible!"

They were standing in sickbay at Culber's workstation. As Stamets was now the computational interface of the spore drive, Culber was hoping to ease the difficulty of his husband's connection to the drive with an implant so that the dangerous, painful system they had recovered from the Glenn could be rendered obsolete, but the technology was slightly beyond Culber's expertise. "I was hoping you could help me refine it," said Culber. "Tweak the design a little?"

When Mischkelovitz looked at Culber this time, her eyes were alight with enthusiasm and there was absolutely no trace of anything negative in her expression or demeanor. "Absolutely! Let's do it." For all that she was standoffish and surly around people she had not accepted into her inner circle, once presented with something she liked, she was entirely won over, like a reluctant child bribed with a new toy.

Culber's initial design for the implant was entirely too big to be practical. They began by refining it in virtual form to reduce its size and complexity. There were several factors to consider. First, the needs of the spore drive itself, which Mischkelovitz seemed unusually familiar with. Second, the features Culber wanted the implant to have, for safety and in the event of a medical emergency. Third, the limits of the technology they could produce aboard Discovery on such short notice.

Mischkelovitz was quite happy and friendly when she had a task to focus on. She also seemed only halfway aware of Culber's presence, even though he was standing right next to her and working on the same project. She chattered away to herself, saying things like, "We have to beroute the riomatter relay through the transventral section in order to ensure uninterrupted frow legulation..."

"Sorry, what?" asked Culber, but Mischkelovitz seemed not to hear him and continued her rambling obliviously. Apparently her use of "we" did not refer to Culber.

"If we switch the configuration of the nanotubes, then we can responsively adjust the row flate to compensate for the constriction mechanically rather than computationally..."

At other times, she seemed overly aware of Culber.

"You're married to him, right?" she suddenly asked. Even though she did not specify Stamets, it was obvious who the implant was for and there was no one else she might be referring to.

"That's right," said Culber.

"Mm," went Mischkelovitz and lapsed into silence, her gaze darkening.

Culber studied her carefully. She was staring intently at a fixed point in space. She had to be thinking about her own deceased husband, which was probably not the healthiest or most productive thing for her to be thinking about in the moment. He decided to try to switch her mind to something that had been bothering him since their previous encounter, risky as it was. "I've noticed you and Captain Lorca seem to get along."

"He likes monsters," supplied Mischkelovitz.

Culber blinked. "You're not a monster."

"Tch," she went. "Of course I am. That's the moral of the story, isn't it? The real monster was Victor von Frankenstein?"

Culber considered Mischkelovitz. That was a truly sad way for her to describe herself, even if she had done things that might warrant usage of the word. "I can't begin to understand what you went through," he said sympathetically, "so I won't judge you for it." He had judged her already, but he was willing to put it aside for the sake of being kind. "I just want to make sure you don't get hurt. Captain Lorca is a... strong personality."

"I like that about him. Very much so."

"It's easy to get swept away by someone like that."

"Don't worry about me. I only go where I'm wanted. If the captain wants me, so be it."

Culber paused. The word choice seemed a little off. "You haven't... with the captain?" It would explain her comfort level with being manhandled by Lorca, her rush to defend him, and even the captain's kindness.

"What?"

"Forget I asked," said Culber, quickly shaking his head. "It's no business of mine who anyone sleeps with, so long as they do it safely." That might apply to Lorca more than most. The captain had something of a reputation in that regard.

"Do you mean have sex?" said Mischkelovitz, looking confused. "I would never compromise my work by wasting my time like that! Ever!"

She seemed genuinely repulsed by the idea. Culber was taken aback. "That isn't..."

Mischkelovitz suddenly brightened. "We can halve the size of the mower podules if we use the outflow return for the subsystems!" She began to make modifications in a flurry of excitement. Suddenly the implant design seemed neither inelegant nor oppressively bulky. It was perfect.

"Thank you," Culber told her. "I really appreciate your help with this."

"That was fun!" she exclaimed, then turned and ran out of sickbay.

It took a few minutes for the computer to finish the fabrication, but when it was done, Culber summoned Stamets to sickbay and presented him with the completed device. "What do you think?"

"What is it?" asked Stamets.

"This is what every astromycologist is going to wish they were wearing at your next conference," grinned Culber, and explained the implant's functions and features. Stamets was entirely impressed, both by the design and that Culber had done this for him.

The surgery was quick and easy. Mischkelovitz's design modifications took into account Stamets' anatomy perfectly, so even though it looked like a giant, painful thing inserted into Stamets' arm, it actually folded around the various blood vessels, muscles, and tendons perfectly. Stamets flexed his hand and smiled at it.

"You're the best," said Stamets.

Culber smiled. "I had a little help." And maybe, just maybe, he had gotten himself into Mischkelovitz's good graces in the process. Though, if the captain wasn't sleeping with Mischkelovitz, what exactly was he using her for?

* * *

The ship fell into a sort of quiet routine the next few days. Everything was going smoothly, if uneventfully, because to everyone's collective surprise, Lorca was presently adhering to the letter of Starfleet Command's desires. Routine spore drive jump tests at scheduled times. No presence at the front. Trying to find a way to duplicate spore drive control without violating augmentation laws.

It began to feel like O'Malley had been given more than enough time to process. Lorca called him to his ready room.

O'Malley refused. "Wanna try that again, colonel?" said Lorca, clearly implying their personal disagreement did not give O'Malley the right to deny a request from Discovery's captain.

"I literally can't. I gave Allan and Larsson leave to go to some disco party. There's no one else on the door."

Lorca started chuckling. Of course O'Malley would do something that pathetic. The party had been a concession to the fact they were presently doing nothing important. May as well let the crew kick back and relax a bit.

"So happy I can amuse," said O'Malley miserably. "Larsson fancies himself some sort of a dancer, and Allan... don't ask me, he's supposed to be asleep right now and apparently he'd rather do that, so I also get to cover part of his shift alone."

"You do not understand how to command," said Lorca, shaking his head.

"Well now, hang on a minute, I—"

The bridge cut in. "Captain, we are detecting an unidentified signal," said Saru.

"Yellow alert. This conversation isn't over, colonel."

"It hasn't even started," managed O'Malley before the ready room door opened and the comm channel cut off.

It turned out to be a gormagander—a space whale. Burnham was apparently some expert in the species, rattling off details of their biology and attributing their decreasing numbers in the galaxy not as a result of hunting but because they focused on feeding so single-mindedly they failed to find the time to mate. "That's as depressing a trait as I've ever heard," quipped Lorca before calling to the helmsman to plot a new course.

"Captain!" interrupted Burnham. "The gormagander is on the endangered species list. Protocol requires us to transfer it to a xenologic facility."

Great. Now not only were they not going to be participating in any battles, they were going to have to play chaperone to a space whale. Burnham seemed enthused for the task, at least. "Then have at it," Lorca told her, and she hurried off to the shuttle bay to oversee the creature's transport onto the ship.

Not five minutes later, it was aboard, and a frantic comm came from the shuttle bay:

"Intruder alert, shots fired," said Burnham breathlessly. "Need immediate assistance."

Tyler was at the security station. He put the security feeds on the main viewscreen. "Intruder's on deck six, sir!"

"I want him locked down!" ordered Lorca, watching as the helmeted assailant strode through Discovery's halls.

"We have him trapped, sir!" reported Tyler after a moment.

Lorca rose from the captain's chair and strode towards the viewscreen. "Whoever you are, drop your weapons. This ends now."

The helmet came off with a round of hearty laughter, revealing a familiar bearded, grinning face. "Did you miss me as much as I missed you?"

"Mudd," said Lorca, almost spitting the name.

"Did you really think that you could leave me to rot in a Klingon prison and not suffer any repercussions!" said Mudd, voice rising as he spoke, hand shaking in anger towards the security monitor. "As soon as I find what's so special about your ship, I'm gonna sell it to the Klingons. Do you hear me, captain?"

"I don't see this ending with you taking my ship," said Lorca, entirely unimpressed.

"Not this time, but I have all the data I need for the next, so, I will see you later. Or, rather, earlier."

Mudd triggered a device in his hand. The corridor flashed with light and Lorca had to close his eyes a moment. When he opened them, the viewscreen was static. "Mr. Saru!"

"Sensors read an amicium and yurium compound explosion," said Saru.

"Hull breach on deck six," said Ash. "Five, four, now three—we can't contain it, captain!"

Lorca felt his heart drop as Discovery was torn apart around him. The last thing he saw was bright yellow-white flames coming towards him.

Reset.

* * *

It was a space whale. Burnham was pleased for it, Lorca was completely annoyed at the prospect of playing chaperone, and he sent Burnham off to handle the situation.

From the belly of the beast itself, Harry Mudd waited and looked over the files from Discovery he had stolen before the reset. He had stripped out all the important stuff—access codes, schematics, crew assignments and the project directory—and he had a lot of data to go through. Luckily, he also had all the time in the world. As the transporter light shimmered around him, he decided to start this little adventure off with a bold gesture. "Computer," he said as the shimmer faded and the gormagander appeared in the shuttle bay with Mudd still inside it, giving Mudd access to the ship's command overrides from his hiding place. "Site to site transport. One to the captain's ready room."

The shimmer of the transporter began again, this time plucking Mudd from the gormagander's digestive tract with the precision of the finest surgeon and depositing him in the ready room.

The lights were dim. A concession to Lorca's damaged eyesight, of course. Mudd snorted at the conceited weakness of the self-imposed impairment. He also frowned at the sight of the standing desk. He had been hoping for a chance to put his feet up while he reviewed Discovery's files, but instead the room was as aggravating as the captain himself.

There was a wooden bowl on the desk filled with fortune cookies. Mudd took one. It read, _There is a prospect of a thrilling time ahead of you_. Mudd's face lit up. "Well now, isn't that just what the captain ordered."

Perfectly aware Lorca was just on the other side of the door attending to matters on the bridge, Mudd decided to stay for a while and munch on cookies as he went over Discovery's project list and schematics. He noted with great interest a laboratory completely shielded from transport. That had to contain a pretty good secret. He also took a glance over the many luminaries that called Discovery their home. Quite an assemblage of minds Lorca had gotten himself. Some genuine surprises in there, too. Emellia Mischkelovitz, for example. Dr. Frankenstein in the flesh. Mudd whistled in appreciation. If nothing else, he had to respect the captain's cojones. Almost as big as his own.

Four meters away, Lorca finished relaying the details of Discovery's newest "assignment" to Starfleet Command and decided to pick up the conversation with O'Malley. "Mr. Saru," he said as he rose from the captain's chair and headed to the ready room, the intonation of Saru's name sufficient to convey the transfer of command over to the first officer.

The ready room doors opened and Lorca found himself staring at Harry Mudd standing next to a bowl's worth of fortunes and cookie crumbs scattered across the desk.

"Why, hello, captain!" said Mudd blithely, raising his disruptor.

"Mudd," scowled Lorca. "What the hell are you doing on my ship!"

"Your ready room is awful! No chairs? Really?" Mudd shot Lorca. He watched with immense satisfaction as the captain disintegrated into a flurry of dust, leaving a singed smell on the air. Tyler appeared in the doorway, phaser drawn, but too late.

Reset.

* * *

This time, Mudd beamed from the gormagander's stomach to the corridor outside Lab 26. A pale, freckled man was guarding the door and raised his rifle in Mudd's direction as the transporter finished with the beam-in. "Identify yourself!"

"Harcourt Fenton Mudd," said Mudd. "I've been sent to review this experiment." He said it with the sort of glib confidence that usually made people think twice and accept a statement as potentially truthful.

"Absolutely not," said the freckled man. "Hands up. Computer, alert the bridge. We have an intruder."

Once again, Mudd found himself face to face with Lorca. "Mudd! What the hell are you doing on my ship?"

"A better question is, what the hell are _you_ doing on your ship?" asked Mudd gleefully. "Computer, transport Captain Lorca to preset coordinates."

He beamed Lorca into space. The door guard clocked him on the back of the head with his rifle, knocking Mudd out, but it mattered not.

Reset.

* * *

Mudd beamed from the gormagander's stomach to the next section of corridor over from Lab 26 and fired his disruptor the moment the freckled man was in view, vaporizing him.

The door did not open. "Computer," said Mudd, "command override."

"This door can only be overridden by Colonel O'Malley's command module," the computer intoned flatly. This made no sense. Mudd had gotten himself the highest command authority, above even the captain, but the captain could not open this door?

"Who the hell is Colonel O'Malley?" asked Mudd aloud, checking the crew files. A freckled face stared back at him. "Well, damn it," said Mudd. He spent a few minutes on a halfhearted attempt to blast open the door to no avail.

"Hey! What are you doing!?" came a deep, booming voice. A pair of officers coming down the hallway had discovered him. They were a mismatched set, one a giant hulking blonde and the other a thinner, dark-haired man. They both had leis around their necks and were holding drinks. Neither was armed.

"What does it look like?" asked Mudd, firing at them. Then he made his way to the bridge. May as well have a little fun if no other progress was going to be made this time around.

"Mudd," scowled Lorca. "What are you doing on my ship!"

"Whatever I want!" exclaimed Mudd gleefully, shooting Lorca on a non-vaporizing kill setting and watching the captain stagger to the floor and collapse, dead.

Reset.

* * *

Mudd set his disruptor to kill without vaporizing and tried again. The freckled Colonel O'Malley fell to the ground in a heap and Mudd began to search him, locating the door control module. He clicked it.

Nothing happened. He clicked it again and again. No reaction. "Computer!" he shouted, really getting annoyed now. "Why won't the door open!"

"The outer door was automatically sealed when biosign termination occurred at..."

"Oh, come on!" screamed Mudd, and kicked the lifeless corpse of O'Malley until a mismatched pair of officers with leis around their necks happened upon him.

He came face to face with Lorca again. "Mudd!" scowled Lorca. "What the hell are you doing on my ship?"

"This," said Mudd, and activated the ship's self-destruct sequence on a ten-second timer. He laughed as he watched Lorca scramble to override it without success and listened as the captain screamed in useless fury as a yellow-white explosion engulfed them.

Reset.

* * *

It was a space whale. Burnham was pleased for it, Lorca was completely annoyed at the prospect of playing chaperone, and he sent Burnham off to handle the situation.

Not ten minutes later, the gormagander was aboard, and soon after a message beeped on the command console at Lorca's arm. He glanced down. It was from Lab 26. He tapped it.

It read simply "TINRUEDR" with no signature attached, but Lorca didn't need an ident to recognize Lalana's typing, because she had a habit of hitting three to four letters at once with her epithelial filaments, jumbling them all together. _TINRUEDR?_ His eyes widened. "Red alert!" he barked, launching himself from the captain's chair to a very confused bridge. "Tyler, with me!"

The ship's site to site transport did not respond to them. They were locked out of the ship's commands. The turbolift was also not responding. "Down the turbolift shaft," ordered Lorca. Thankfully, down was a much quicker trip than up. Lorca slid down the access ladder at an almost breakneck pace and he and Tyler burst out onto level nine with phasers at the ready.

He found O'Malley laying in a pool of blood in the corridor and checked for a pulse. It was weak, but still there. He grabbed O'Malley. "Computer, emer—" The words died on his lips. No emergency transport. They were locked out.

O'Malley groaned slightly, eyes half-opening. "Gabe," he managed, only the first syllable.

Lorca stared at O'Malley. He was so pale even his freckles seemed to be disappearing. "Tyler! Get someone from medical down here." The only other option was try to carry O'Malley up the turbolift shaft, but with the loss of blood, he needed to be stabilized first. Tyler rushed off to fetch a doctor.

O'Malley's hand weakly reached up and grabbed Lorca's collar. "Listen," whispered O'Malley. "He locked the outer door, but there's a secret way in. Bottom left panel." This was a gross violation of the lab's security procedures, but Lorca could lecture O'Malley about it later.

Lorca carefully lowered O'Malley back down and went to the indicated panel, prying it off with his fingernails. There was a passage behind it too narrow for Lorca. "How am I supposed to," Lorca began, turning to look back at O'Malley only to find O'Malley was crawling over. Lorca darted back to O'Malley's side. "Stop moving!"

O'Malley clutched his hand to his wound. The main attack had been a knife wound directed just below the body armor and up towards the gut to ensure a slow, lingering death. "I'm fine. Look, this is just dinner at my house. Help me in there. I'll open the door from the inside."

There was enough blood on the floor to bathe in, but every minute out here was a minute Mudd was in there with Lalana and Mischkelovitz unsupervised. Lorca dragged O'Malley over to the passageway, helped him squirm inside it, and watched as he disappeared into the darkness. Then he did the thing he hated most: he waited.

The outer door opened after a minute. O'Malley was slumped against the wall, a dark red smear of blood behind him. Lorca stepped into the outer chamber and crouched down to check his pulse.

"Tell Melly... just as much."

"Tell her yourself," said Lorca. O'Malley's pulse was so weak Lorca could not find it.

O'Malley smiled faintly. "Guess... your secret's safe... with me." He closed his eyes and slumped forward. A message popped up on the internal door controls: BIOLOCK PROTOCOL ACTIVE. The outer door slid shut. The display updated: EXTERNAL ACCESS PROHIBITED.

Lorca straightened and readied his phaser. Thankfully, he was already inside. He hit the command to open the internal door.

The intruder in the lab heard the door and reacted by grabbing Mischkelovitz and pulling her in front of him. "Captain! How good of you to join us," said a familiarly taunting voice.

"Mudd," sneered Lorca, face contorting with rage. "What the hell are you doing on my ship!"

Mudd was standing with one hand tightly around Mischkelovitz's neck. Lalana was just off to the side, hands knocking rapidly together in alarm. Mischkelovitz was much smaller than Mudd and made a poor human shield, but between her and Lalana, Mudd had made the better choice in terms of coverage. Mischkelovitz looked at Lorca with terror in her eyes. "Gabe!" she squealed. Her usage of the short form was not something she had ever done directly before. Lorca knew from watching her on the security feeds it was how she referred to him when she was alone.

Mudd grinned, disruptor hovering at Mischkelovitz's ear. "First-name basis! Well then, _Gabe_ , looks like I've found a few of your secrets this time! Never thought I'd get to see your lului. It's much better than the one in that Markalian zoo."

The distance wasn't tremendous, and the lights burned his eyes, but Lorca felt he could make the shot. He aimed his phaser.

In response, Mudd pulled Mischkelovitz more tightly against him and turned his disruptor towards the captain.

Both shots went off at the same time, but neither hit their mark. A blue shape appeared in the air between them, propelled from the side, intercepting both blasts and absorbing the shot that might have taken Mudd's life and would certainly have taken Lorca's. Lorca had one fleeting glimpse of green eyes looking at him and then she was gone, disintegrated into wisps of dust that burned away into nothing and left a singed smell on the air.

The shock lasted but a moment as both men realized their kill shots had failed to eliminate their opponent and took action.

Mudd fired again, but his shot went too high as Lorca ducked into a charge, screaming with a fury that told Mudd he had made an enormous mistake. With absolutely no concern for Mischkelovitz, Lorca barreled into Mudd and his hostage, slamming them both to the ground, the brunt of the impact cracking a number of Mischkelovitz's ribs. Straddling both Mudd and Mischkelovitz, Lorca pinned Mudd's weapon with one hand and pummeled the butt of his phaser against Mudd's face with such force it shattered Mudd's nose. He brought it down again, rage filling his ears, totally oblivious to Mudd's pained yell and Mischkelovitz's terrified, raspy scream as she struggled to breathe beneath his weight. There was a faint crunch as Mudd's orbital bone fractured.

Lorca dropped his phaser but did not cease his onslaught, continuing to batter Mudd with his bare fist. The fracture deepened, the face pulped, and still he continued, the cracking sounds coming as much from his own fist as Mudd's skull bones.

He finally heard Mischkelovitz crying and stopped, rolling off of her and Mudd. His breath heaved in his chest. Mischkelovitz squirmed weakly and whimpered in pain. Lorca's right hand was a uselessly twisted mess, but he managed to get his arms under Mischkelovitz and lift her up.

He stepped over O'Malley's body in the outer chamber. He was careful to keep Mischkelovitz's face against his chest so she would not see what had happened. As if losing a husband and sibling already weren't enough, she had now lost the one person who probably loved her more than anyone else in the universe.

Lorca hushed her softly. "Shh, I got you." He understood what it felt like to lose everyone and everything. Now he understood it twice over. He could still see that last flash of Lalana's bright green eyes in his mind. He triggered the external door with the internal system override.

Tyler, Culber, Larsson, and Allan were in the corridor. Culber gasped and quickly went into action, scanning with his tricorder for injuries. He scanned O'Malley, too, but the life sign was already long gone. Allan and Larsson looked ridiculous in their leis, drinks in hand. Allan also looked absolutely distraught. "This isn't happening!" Allan exclaimed. "How is this happening? This isn't supposed to happen!" He looked to Larsson as if he expected the Swede to somehow know.

Tyler noticed the bloody tangle of Lorca's hand limply dangling alongside Mischkelovitz's arm. "Let me take her, sir," he offered.

"She's my responsibility," said Lorca. He owed O'Malley that, at least.

The timer on Mudd's device maxed out. They were enveloped by a yellow-white explosion.

Reset.

* * *

Lab 26 was full of secrets, but not the one Mudd was after. At least Mischkelovitz had turned out to be a useful source of information in the minutes before Lorca's arrival. "It's not us!" she had squealed at him. "We're trying bloak creaks! Bloak creaks—bloak—cloak breaks! You want the mushrooms!" Finally, Mudd understood where he needed to go.

Engineering test bay alpha. On paper, mushroom spore propulsion sounded like a bad joke, but apparently it was a viable technology. Armed with this information, Mudd began his assault on engineering. He had full control of the computer and made short work of the staff in there. Unfortunately, he was unable to ascertain exactly how the drive functioned.

Something was missing, he realized. If he was going to sell this ship to the Klingons, he had to figure out what.

This time, he beamed onto the bridge, took out the crew there first, and then came last for Lorca in his ready room. Perfect timing, really. But then, it always was.

Reset.

* * *

Stamets was having a very weird day.

One moment, he was in quarters dismissing Culber's ongoing concerns about his personality changes as being silly, because he felt good, relaxed, better than ever. The next, they were enveloped by a yellow-white explosion and then he was walking down the corridor with Culber away from sickbay again.

"Hang on a sec," he said. "Weren't we just here a minute ago?"

Culber looked at him like he might be crazy, which was a look he was getting used to these days.

Stamets dismissed it the first time. Some sort of bad déjà vu.

Then it happened again. And again.

Stamets tried to alert Burnham and Tyler. "It all starts with a gormagander!" he managed.

* * *

It was a space whale. "Oh, for crying out loud," said Lorca. "Cancel yellow alert."

"Sir, scans show the gormagander's bio readings to be highly unstable," reported Saru, and informed Lorca that they were required under the Endangered Species Act to transport it somewhere.

Both Burnham and Tyler suddenly objected. Burnham looked like she had seen a ghost. Lorca stared at the two of them, wondering what was going on. "Let's beam this thing into the shuttle bay and drop it off at the nearest sanctuary soon as we can," said Lorca.

"Captain, I would like to run point on this, sir," said Burnham.

"I don't give a damn," Lorca said, shaking his head at her. "I just want it done." The sooner they got this little detour over and done with, the sooner they could get back to doing something, anything of actual use in the war. Even if that something was just scheduled spore drive tests.

"I request security oversight of the operation," said Tyler.

"I still don't give a damn," said Lorca, and sent them on their way.

A few minutes later, the computer suddenly initiated a black alert. Lorca had not issued any such command. "Computer, show me engineering!"

"Denied," said the computer.

He ordered Tyler to engineering and began to elicit solutions from the bridge crew. "There is nothing we can do, captain. We are locked out of our systems," reported Saru. "We only have nonessential systems."

"Screw the systems, get all security personnel to the lab any way possible," said Lorca. "Through the Jeffreys tubes. Airiam, get me any useful systems control you can manage. I'll take environmental, lights, anything."

"Warning, critical systems overload in 20 seconds," said the computer.

Twenty seconds was not enough time to do anything. Lorca felt a chill at the utter familiarity of this whole situation. It was the Buran all over again.

"Warning, drive overload," said the computer.

"Somebody give me something!" he screamed at the bridge, not wanting this to be the way it ended, not after everything. He looked helplessly at his crew. He had failed them entirely.

Explosion and reset.

* * *

It just kept happening over and over. Stamets was trapped in a time loop and no one on the ship but him knew it. It was some quirk of the quantum nature of the mycelial network he was now genetically connected to.

He figured a little bit more out each time. There was an intruder on the ship who arrived hiding in the belly of a gormagander. The intruder had control of the ship's computer. Every single time, people died. Different people different times.

He tried to explain it to Lorca on the fourth reset. The first attempt went about as well as could be expected.

"Captain, we're caught in a temporal loop!" he declared as he entered the bridge.

Lorca pressed the controls on the arm of his chair. "Dr. Culber. Lieutenant Stamets seems to have gotten loose on my bridge. See if you can't come up here and corral him?"

"No, listen to me!" exclaimed Stamets, but Lorca did not.

The fifth reset, the intruder did something different, and Lorca was not even on the bridge when Stamets got there. The sixth reset, things were back to normal and Stamets spoke Lorca's words as Lorca said them: "Lieutenant Stamets seems to have gotten loose on my bridge—" at this point Lorca stopped talking and just stared, so Stamets finished the sentence for him "—see if you can't come up here and corral him."

They were locked out of the main computer functions, but Lorca managed to open a shipwide comm and Mudd was all too happy to answer and stare Lorca directly in the face.

"We meet again, captain," said Mudd. "And again, and again..." He chuckled in amusement.

"Mudd! What the hell are you doing on my ship," scowled Lorca.

"Really, captain, this time you've managed to surprise me! How did you find out I was here?"

Stamets suddenly got the sinking feeling that enlisting Lorca's aid was too obvious and would tip Mudd off as to his awareness of the time loop.

In the end, Lorca antagonized Mudd, Mudd activated the ship's self-destruct in retaliation, and they all blew up again.

Stamets tried Tyler. Tyler was trusted by the captain and could advise discretion, but the problem was, Tyler did not trust Stamets. Fair enough. As much time as Stamets spent trying to get to know him in the time loop, for Tyler, it was always the first time they had ever really spoken. Tilly was also a bust; she was at the party and a little too drunk to take him seriously.

Stamets turned his attention to Burnham. He managed to convince her after a few tries, but they were almost out of time in the currently ongoing loop. "Tell me a secret," he prompted her. "Something that will immediately prove to you we've had this conversation. Something you've never admitted to anyone. I promise it'll be safe with me."

She believed him, so she told him her secret.

Explosion and reset.

* * *

Lorca sat in the captain's chair. "Is the fish safely on board yet?" he asked.

"Technically, it's not a fish," said Saru, "it's..."

Lorca shot Saru a look. Saru obligingly shut up. Then Culber requested Lorca in sickbay urgently to discuss Lieutenant Stamets. Lorca stepped into the turbolift with a gnawing feeling of worry in his stomach. "Sickbay, direct."

The turbolift started, then stopped. "Destination canceled," the computer informed him. The doors at the rear of the turbolift opened and Lorca turned to see one of his officers crumple to the ground with a knife in his back.

"Heavy," said a familiar, bearded man holding a disruptor.

"Mudd!" exclaimed Lorca and ordered a red alert. The computer did not respond to him. "What the hell are you doing on my ship?"

"You ask me that question every single time," said Mudd. "You know that, don't you? Of course you don't." Mudd fired a shot past Lorca's arm in a demonstration of his seriousness and ordered Lorca to move. "I really can't take it from the top all over for you again, Lorca. The message from the doctor was not real, I just wanted some alone time with you. There's an area of the ship I can't access and I'm hoping you're hiding your secrets to the spore drive—"

"I don't know what you're talking about, Mudd," said Lorca, immediately thinking of Lab 26, "but if you think I'm gonna help you in any way at all, you're crazier than I remember."

"There really are so many ways to blow up this ship, it's almost a design flaw," said Mudd. "Computer! Access self-destruct program."

A chill rushed across Lorca. This was entirely familiar to him. It felt like he was on the Buran all over again. "Stop," he said. "We'll go wherever you want."

"Then get a move on," said Mudd, giving his disruptor a little shake to indicate Lorca should get a move on.

Lorca realized they were not heading towards Lab 26. On the one hand, he was relieved because that meant everything there was safe. On the other, he would really have liked the support of O'Malley's rifle and independent security protocols right now.

Instead, Mudd dropped every hapless crewman unfortunate enough to cross paths with them. At least there were fewer people in the halls than usual. A significant portion of the crew were attending that party.

"You know, I've had a lot of fun so far on Discovery. Found out so many of your secrets. Even had a go at your lului!"

Lorca realized Mudd had already accessed Lab 26. "Mudd," he growled, jaw clenching and teeth hissing.

"Don't worry, captain, that was ages ago! Haven't bothered with them at all this time around. She and that darling little Dr. Frankenstein are snug as bugs right now. I can change that, of course, if you don't cooperate, _Gabe_."

They arrived outside of Lorca's study. Mudd needed Lorca to provide the personal passcode for entry. Once inside, Mudd found not the secrets of the spore drive he was so desperately searching for, but a lovely collection of weapons from across the cosmos instead. He began to rummage through the guns on offer, looking for one to try.

"Do you know how many times I've had the pleasure of taking your life, Lorca?" sneered Mudd. "Fifty-three! But who's counting. And it never gets old." Mudd checked his wrist. "Oh, drat, we're almost out of time. I'll figure out how that little drive of yours works sooner or later. I've got all the time in the world." And he shot Lorca and watched him vaporize into little flecks of burning particles.

Reset.

* * *

"Has that fish beamed aboard safely yet?"

"Well, technically it's not a fish—"

Lorca gave Saru a look. Saru obligingly shut up. "Where the hell are Burnham and Tyler?" asked Lorca. He had called them to the bridge five minutes ago.

Then music began to play. Sweeping, orchestral, triumphant. Wagner.

"Mr. Saru!"

"I don't understand, sir, I'm locked out of the ship's controls."

Lorca hit the panel on his chair. "Computer." Nothing. "Computer, respond!"

The turbolift doors opened. "Let me see what I can do!" announced a familiar, taunting voice. "Computer, reduce volume so we can have a normal, adult conversation."

"Yes, Captain Mudd," said the computer.

Lorca rose from his chair. "Captain Mudd!" he exclaimed, incredulous.

Mudd shrugged at him. "I never thought I would say this, but I'm actually tired of gloating. In any case, this is very much my ship. Your ship? Very much not at all."

Lorca started towards Mudd, because no one—not Mudd, not Cornwell, not anyone—was allowed to take Discovery from him. "All right, show's over, Mudd. Back to whatever little hole you crawled out of—"

"To the brig!" said Mudd, and Lorca vanished in the glimmer of the transporter.

Burnham, Tyler, and Stamets arrived on the bridge. Armed with Burnham's secret, Stamets had managed to enlist both her and Tyler, because while Tyler did not trust Stamets, he trusted Burnham.

Mudd vaporized Tyler in a burst of weaponized antimatter as reward for their efforts. Burnham watched in horror as Tyler vanished before her eyes.

Mudd was hitting the limits of his patience. He was at the point where destroying Discovery was seeming just as palatable an option as selling it to the Klingons. "How do I start that engine, hm? I will disintegrate every single one of you in a screaming fit of agony one at a time. Starting with you!" Mudd started towards Saru.

"Stop!" shouted Stamets. "I can't watch you kill any more people." He pulled up the sleeve of his uniform tunic, revealing the implant that allowed him to interface with the spore drive. "It needs me to work."

Mudd laughed with glee. He finally had everything he needed. "Delicious. Shall we to the engine room?"

* * *

There was no one in the brig. No one had been recently locked up, so no one was needed there on duty. Lorca tried to override the controls from inside with no luck. The computer remained unresponsive. He pounded his fists on the forcefield, knowing it would have no effect, but needing some physical outlet to his anger.

He turned his attention to the small console in the wall. It was entirely rudimentary, locked out of most ship systems, but it was his only option. It had the capacity to order food, bring out the cot from the wall, provide a moment's privacy for using the toilet, and not much else. At least, it wasn't supposed to have anything else.

Lorca blinked at the words "BRIG CHESS" in the list of available commands and touched it.

"ENTER NAME" prompted the display, offering him an old-school keyboard and four spaces to fill. Lorca was five letters, so he entered LORC. It then prompted him to set a password, this time a 4-digit numerical code. He entered 1031, Discovery's registry number.

The screen split into two halves. The left half was a leaderboard with names on it. ROVE, M.B., NATE, MISH, LLNA, SARU, AIRM, PAUL, SILY, and more. Each name had a score attached.

The right side showed who was online and listed only one player at present, MISH. Lorca had a good guess who that was. He touched the name. It then prompted him to select from a variety of chess formats including Vulcan. He selected Classic. "REQUEST SENT" appeared and then a chat room popped up.

MISH: Captain?  
LORC: in brig  
LORC: ship taken  
LORC: send mac  
MISH: Okay he's on his way by the way Lalana says there is a halo of stars everywhere.

Lorca stared at that.

LORC: what  
MISH: I think she is describing some sort of particle field aberration. I'm not certain what. I'm working to figure it out.

Probably it was related to however Mudd had gotten control of the ship.

O'Malley arrived and tried to lower the forcefield to no avail. "Sorry, captain, I'm totally locked out."

"Try shooting it," growled Lorca.

"That only works in movies!"

"Well if you have a better idea!" Lorca exclaimed.

"I might. Let's call John. If anyone can get control of the systems, it's him."

"Groves?" Lorca found that assertion faintly ridiculous. Groves could get control of a ship that its own captain had been locked out of?

"As he's very fond of pointing out, he could have walked out of that brig any time he wanted to. He simply chose not to. He's probably the best systems hacker you'll ever meet."

A long time ago, Mischkelovitz had said John Groves could be useful in unexpected ways. It seemed the time had finally come for Groves to fulfill that mandate and serve a purpose.

* * *

While Lorca languished in the brig and Stamets stalled Mudd in the engineering lab, Burnham continued working to figure out how Mudd was engineering the time loop. Understanding that could bring an end to all of this.

Mudd was not the only thing that had been hiding in the gormagander. An entire ship, linked to the device on Mudd's arm, served as the basis of the time loop power.

Burnham had a plan. There was one secret of Lorca's Mudd had yet to unravel: her. She was something the Klingons would pay a lot to get, perhaps even more than Discovery itself. She approached Mudd in the ready room, revealed herself, and tantalized Mudd with the prospect of selling her for even more riches.

"Why are you telling me this?" asked Mudd. "What's in it for you?"

"Lieutenant Tyler," said Burnham.

"Lieutenant Tyler is dead," said Mudd.

"Not for long," said Burnham, and used one of the weaponized antimatter modules to disintegrate herself before Mudd's eyes.

The Klingons were hailing. "Damn it!" exclaimed Mudd. He wanted everything. Especially now that he knew exactly how much everything on this ship was worth.

In the brig, Groves released Lorca and opened his mouth to gloat about the sudden reversal of their fortunes, but his triumph was short-lived.

Reset.

* * *

Stamets, Burnham, and Tyler approached Lorca. After so many loops, there was no time. They had to get everything right. It was unlikely they would get another chance.

When Mudd arrived on the bridge, Lorca did not even turn to look at the turbolift doors as he said, "Captain Mudd."

"What's this?" asked Mudd, finding all of them ready and waiting.

Lorca stood up. "Your chair," he offered, stepping aside.

They told Mudd he had won. That after so many loops, Stamets had concluded Mudd was unbeatable, and now Mudd had everything he wanted.

"So, Harcourt Fenton Mudd, the USS Discovery is yours." Even knowing it was a falsehood, it still galled Lorca to say the words.

"As am I," said Burnham.

Mudd laughed. "Don't try to con a con man!"

"I'm not," said Lorca. "I'm negotiating with a businessman. My offer is simple. The lives of my crew in exchange for... Burnham, the ship, and Stamets."

"Why would a Federation captain do that?" asked Mudd.

"I will not have a repeat of the Buran." This, at least, was not a falsehood. He extended Mudd his hand. "Your word, Mudd."

Mudd took his time, considered the hand being offered, and finally smiled. "Well, I've never been one to look a gift captain in the mouth!" He shook Lorca's hand with enthusiasm. Lorca looked and felt crushed by the exchange. He hated this. He hated this so much.

Now that Mudd had everything he wanted, he let the temporal loop expire. The time crystal on his arm disintegrated. From here on out, everything was going to be permanent. No more do-overs.

"Captain Mudd, we are being hailed by the Klingons," reported the computer.

Lorca looked at Burnham. If any of them died now, it would be for good, forever. He did not want any of them to die.

Mudd took Burnham and Stamets down to the transporter room to meet the Klingons. "Not you, old man," Mudd said to Lorca. "Lorca, I'm gonna really miss killing you. Adieu, mon capitan!"

Lorca stood on the bridge as the door closed. "Mr. Saru," he said, and returned to the captain's chair. "Bring up the security feeds. Mr. Tyler, let's get you in position." Lorca did not smile, because there was still a risk and Burnham and Stamets were both down there with Mudd and a disruptor, but he was beginning to feel more himself now that the situation was coming back under his control.

Tyler beamed to an adjacent corridor to ambush Mudd. Lorca watched as Stamets and Burnham distracted Mudd and disarmed him. And then, the kicker: when Mudd had thought he was signaling the Klingons, he instead had signaled other parties interested in obtaining not Discovery but Mudd himself.

"Turns out, you can con a con man," said Burnham, and as he watched and listened from the bridge, Lorca smiled. _Attagirl, Michael._

* * *

"The stars are gone now," Lalana said to Mischkelovitz. "Whatever was happening has ended."

Mischkelovitz stared at the readouts in the lab. Despite her best efforts and her suspicions, she had been unable to figure out exactly what Lalana was seeing, she only knew that Lalana was seeing something.

"Can you tell me all the other times you've seen these stars?" asked Mischkelovitz.

"Of course. The first time was when I met Captain Lorca on the Triton. They were lingering around him like a halo. The second time was when I came aboard Discovery. They were outside the lab, just in front of it. The third time was when we were in null time. They were diffuse that time, different, dimmer."

"And you think they lead you to where you're supposed to be?" This had been Lalana's assertion when the stars had shown up again thirty minutes earlier.

"I can think of no other explanation, except this time, they were everywhere, so bright and sparkling, and now suddenly they are gone."

Mischkelovitz chewed her lip. She did not think the "star halo" was what Lalana thought it was. Mischkelovitz did not believe in fate. "I need something," said Mischkelovitz. "And I need you to answer me honestly. That's not the thing I need, but I need you do this, too."

"I will answer what I am able," said Lalana, which was no promise at all.

Mischkelovitz knew better than to speak the words where the security monitors would overhear. She twitched her finger at Lalana and they moved into Lalana's quarters. Mischkelovitz locked the door behind them, turned towards Lalana, and said with sudden strength and clarity, "You're a part of Section 31, aren't you?"

Lalana tilted her head to the side. "I do not even know what that is. Why would you say such a thing?"

"We were working for them, and they have Rischka's mesearch, and I need that research and the quantum accelerator and scanner we developed. Can you get those things for me?"

Lalana straightened, her tail against the floor for balance. "I will steal it if I have to. How did you know I was with Section 31?"

"Because," grinned Mischkelovitz, her eyes crazily wide and somehow more uneven than usual, "you always lie." In Mischkelovitz's experience, that was the one thing you could always count on Section 31 to do. They had lied when they promised things to her and Milosz about their research. They had lied when they took the research away after he died.

Lalana clicked her tongue in happy mirth. "You are only the second human to have noticed that!"

* * *

O'Malley and Lorca finally resumed their discussion in Lorca's ready room.

"Look, Gabriel, it's all well and good, you locking me out of the communications systems, but I would really like to call my wife, and frankly, if it comes out that I didn't report anything because you prevented me, that's going to reflect rather badly. So knock it off."

Lorca frowned. "I can't let you send that report, Mac."

"Don't you want to know what it says?" O'Malley tossed his padd onto Lorca's desk.

It was the worst report Lorca had ever read. It mentioned an incident had occurred involving a weapon in the captain's quarters, but that the witness was unable to provide an official statement, investigation was presently stalled and inconclusive, and factors were at play that might have compromised both parties regarding the incident. There was no mention of what these factors were, what the accusation was, or even the fact the unnamed witness was an admiral who had been captured by Klingons. At the bottom the report said _Preliminary investigation inconclusive_.

"So now our asses are covered," said O'Malley. "My ass, anyway. If Cornwell ever turns up, I was unable to proceed owing to her absence, and if you get your wish, the poor woman will end up murdered and this will never go any further."

Lorca chewed his lip. He could hear it in O'Malley's tone, but just in case, he looked up at O'Malley's face. It was grim and very displeased. "Don't even think about thanking me," said O'Malley. "I officially owe you no favors. And for the record, Cornwell's right. You do need help. It just so happens we still need you. I feel sick for my part in this, do you understand that? I'm absolutely gutted. I don't know how you can live with yourself."

Lorca's mouth tugged into a frown. He could live with it because he still had Discovery and everyone on it, but he could tell this was eating O'Malley up. "Listen," he began.

"No, you listen! You're better than this. Every time you do some awful thing to someone, you always manage to make up for it somehow, so you have to do that now. You have to make this count. I don't care what it is, just give me something that matters. Just—something!" O'Malley's lip trembled and his nose scrunched up. He clasped his hand to his face. His voice cracked as he said, "God, I hate you! You have to do better, Gabriel, please."

Lorca considered O'Malley. For all that O'Malley was pathetic, he had also gone out of his way to protect Lorca despite the personal toll it was taking. "All right, Mac," said Lorca. "I'll find a way to make this count." He would single-handedly kill every last Klingon if that's what it took.

O'Malley's hand fell away, revealing a pain as deep as any Lorca had ever seen. "It's not that easy." O'Malley sighed, shook his head, and looked away. Then he said in a small voice, "Computer. Site to site transport. Personal quarters."

Lorca had a fairly good idea O'Malley had done that so no one would see him cry. He stared at the empty air where O'Malley had been standing. The ship seemed suddenly a little lonelier.


	67. Einstein on the Beach

A/N: This takes place after episode 7, "Magic to Make the Sanest Man Go Mad," and is a little heavy on the OCs, sorry if that's not your preference. There's a bit of fluff (and a joke I've been waiting 240,000 words to make which is so delightfully awful), but also some final set up for the end that's coming. There is one person out there who likes Groves best out of everyone, so I dedicate the Groves content to that person (you know who you are).

Also, did anyone catch the big clue in time loop? Can you see someone's secret yet? There was one line in there that revealed something big, but then it was undone by the temporal reset... I spend a lot of time wondering if anyone sees where this is going. There are so many dominoes lined up, I'm really looking forward to tipping them over.

Lastly, sorry for the delay in posting, internet connection issues!

* * *

"Actually, you were the one most likely to believe me. That was the weird thing."

"Oh?"

Lorca and Stamets were in the ready room going over the events of Mudd's time loop. Of all the crew, only Stamets had any understanding of the full breadth of the encounter because only he was aware of all the loops in the way Mudd was.

"Hugh thought I was having some sort of break from reality, Burnham needed so much convincing, Tyler never believed me unless I had Burnham tell him... But with you, I repeated your words once, just the once, and you were on board with it."

"That surprises you?" Lorca took a fortune cookie and pushed the bowl towards Stamets. The fortune read, _Good news will come to you from far away_.

"Well, yes," said Stamets, taking a cookie as well. "It's no secret you hate me." His fortune was, _Generosity and perfection are your everlasting goals_.

Lorca's eyebrows shot up in surprise. "I don't hate you."

Stamets squinted at the captain. "You don't?"

Lorca shrugged lightly. "Sometimes you need a little extra push to get us where we're going."

"A push," echoed Stamets, squinting all the more. "More like a push down the stairs."

Lorca snorted with amusement. "Sometimes that's the fastest way to get down them."

Stamets mouth fell open and he stared in silent amazement. Delight spread across his face. "My god, you don't hate me, do you? You _like_ me."

"Let's not get ahead of ourselves."

"I mean, a few times Mudd tried to get you off the bridge by pretending there was a medical emergency. You didn't go when he said it was Mischkelovitz, or Egarova, but when he said it was me, you went immediately. I thought it was just because you were worried about the drive, but there's more to it, isn't there? You actually like me!"

Stamets had learned a lot in his many loops through time. Maybe too much. Lorca did his best to remain impassive. "I don't _hate_ you, which is a far cry from liking you, lieutenant."

"But that's just it. I can see everything so clearly now! You really enjoy pushing my buttons, don't you?" Lorca glowered. Stamets grinned. "Captain, that's as sweet as it is disturbing!"

"Mr. Stamets," Lorca growled.

"Okay, captain, I hear you," said Stamets, holding his hands up in surrender and grinning. "You can push me around all you like, I won't push back."

Lorca tried not to smile and failed miserably, ending up with an awkward and entirely unconvincing almost-frown, because frankly, that was the best invitation he'd gotten all week. He managed to turn his expression into a sneer as he said with all the acid he could muster, "If we can stay on task, lieutenant."

Stamets was not fooled in the slightest because he really did see everything now. Ever since his integration with the mycelial network, it felt like all of spacetime was laid out before him and he could access any and all of it. The network went everywhere, and he was part the network. "You want to hear a few of Mudd's one-liners?" he offered. "I mean, they were all at your expense, but they're pretty funny!"

"Fine," said Lorca, certain he was going to hate this.

"So, this one time, you asked him what the hell he was doing on the ship, and he said, 'Whatever I want!' and then he shot you."

Stamets had never heard Lorca genuinely laugh before. It was, Stamets concluded, pretty awesome.

* * *

When he was done with Stamets, Lorca received a holocomm request from Lalana. He locked the ready room door. "Good morning, Gabriel," she said. "I need to stop by Memory Alpha. Can we do that?"

"I'm going to lean on the side of no," said Lorca.

"I do not think you understand. Either Discovery is taking me to Memory Alpha, or I am leaving Discovery, because I require something which is on Memory Alpha."

"Lalana, that's—"

"If it helps, I can ask Starfleet to order us there to download Discovery's data archives to preserve a record of everything relating to our spore drive research, but it would be quicker if we simply went and Starfleet was not aware of it. Of course, if it is your preference, I will leave for the Gabriella immediately and make my own way."

Lorca took a deep breath. "Lalana. This is _my_ ship. You do _not_ tell Starfleet what to do with _my_ ship." The last thing he wanted was Mischkelovitz's map downloaded into the central library archives.

Her head turned almost completely sideways. "Then will you take me or am I leaving?"

Lorca shook his head as he sighed. "What exactly do you need on Memory Alpha?"

"The lului box."

The silver brick, gifted by Umale, of unknown purpose and operation, which some part of Lorca genuinely suspected to be a paperweight. "Why now?"

"Emellia and I have a theory as to its use. We believe it may be a self-powered computer capable of performing the calculations needed to use the spore drive without Stamets, and that the reason the Federation has not been able to fully ascertain this yet is that it requires a lului to operate. Since I am the only lului available, it stands to reason we should bring it aboard."

"That is a whopping big _if_ ," said Lorca.

"Emellia has studied the data readouts and she feels they support this conclusion. Emellia is very smart, so I trust her assessment, and if she is right, then having the box here on board where it can be readily used for this purpose seems wise. Do you not think?"

Lorca did trust Mischkelovitz's assessments. They tended to be correct in his experience, even if a few of her assertions like the existence of chronitons in the null time bubble remained unproven. If she was right about this, it might give them a viable backup to Stamets in the event of his incapacitation, and if she was wrong, well, maybe they could find some other use for that mystery box.

Lalana hopped forward. "We can go together, you and I. It will be the sort of mission you can do while everyone else waits on the ship for a change. Aren't you tired of waiting on the ship, playing captain? Would you not like to get out there and do something? It will be as much fun as Tederek. Remember Tederek?" She hopped forward again. "Sneaking around right under everyone's noses and they will never know how foolish they truly are."

There was another thing to consider, too. The lului box wasn't the only thing he might retrieve from Memory Alpha. There were also potentially full, unredacted copies of records which had been legally sealed. The lului box might serve as a good excuse to see what Groves was hiding behind those court orders.

Still, it was risky, it would mean stepping off of Discovery (which he was loathe to do), and objections had to be raised. Lorca leaned one hand against his desk and put the other on his hip. "You're talking about jumping us past Earth. We've never gone that far."

She used her tail as support to stretch up slightly. "Then would not it be impressive to do? And just think, nobody but us will know we did it. And if there is an emergency, we will simply jump back here. Though, you may have to leave me behind since I cannot beam back aboard on short notice."

If there was an emergency, Starfleet wasn't going to be able to reach them, because they would be several sectors away from where they were supposed to be. Unless they left a communications relay, carefully disguised and coded to forward any transmissions to them. There was an asteroid belt in a nearby system that could serve as cover for such a relay. Alternately, they might leave behind an entire shuttle, since a shuttle could move around and make it look like Discovery was still in the area, but if Lalana was going, they would need a shuttle to move from the ship to the planet, and that might be too many shuttles out at once...

Lalana watched Lorca as the wheels turned in his head and was entirely pleased with herself. She could clearly see on his face that he had already decided they were going to do it. She knew full well how much Lorca loved proving his own superiority over the rest of the hoodwinked masses.

* * *

In this regard, Lorca was not alone, but for John Groves, life was not a grand adventure so much as a series of unfolding disappointments.

This was not a new conclusion on Groves' part. He had realized life was not all it was cracked up to be a long time ago, earlier than most, and had been languishing under the enduring futility of it all ever since. It was all random, for starters. Evolution, existence, love, death, pain. That a single sperm hit an egg and gave rise to a person was as random and pointless as anything could be. Even when the combination was entirely directed and controlled for the purposes of bringing about that specific person, as had been the case for most of Groves' relations. It was still an unfortunate bit of senseless chaos.

His own life in particular was a pointless routine. Wake up in the morning, make some tea, drink it with Lalana, wait for Mischkelovitz to stumble out of her wall dwelling, make sure she was brushed and washed and all those stupid little things she always forgot about unless prompted. He envied her those wall compartments. He had outgrown the ability to squeeze into them twenty years ago and lost some part of his connection to her and Milosz in the process. He had become an outsider in a very literal sense. Now that they were adults and could control the size of the compartments, the designs still precluded him from entering. Instead, O'Malley had taken his place.

This morning, two unusual things happened. First, during morning tea, Lalana asked him to tell Mischkelovitz their conversation from last night had been "fully realized." The word choice, like most things about Lalana, struck Groves as patently odd.

The second oddity was that, after the regular morning tasks and receiving this missive, Mischkelovitz announced she was leaving the lab to attend to something.

"Whatever, cool," said Groves. He went and sat in his corner with his padd and opened Brig Chess.

It was called Brig Chess because he had programmed it while sitting in the brig and used it to pass the time there. It had caught on among various members of the crew who liked chess. The styling of the program was delightfully no-frills and retro. All player names were four characters long, an homage to the invention of arcade games, and the green-on-black coloration was a direct reference to early computing systems.

Groves had five games going at the moment, two of them blind on his end, and quickly sent out a new round of moves to his opponents. He had the highest score in the game largely because, unlike everyone else on the ship, he could afford to take on as many opponents as he wanted. He had no other official duties to attend to.

Which was not to say he had nothing to do. There were also two dozen legal briefs sent from various offices across the quadrant requesting his attention. The war did not negate the slow process of justice in the Federation. A few of the briefs he could not help with from Discovery and he denied their requests. The others, he drafted arguments for and filed them into the queue for transmission at Discovery's next unrestricted communications relay.

A new brig chess game request pinged. Groves checked it. It was from "M.B." _I wish to play Vulcan chess_ , the message read.

 _Sure_ , he wrote back. Vulcan chess was a bit of a misnomer; it was a game that had arisen on Vulcan which bore some similarities to Earth chess in that there was a board and various specialized pieces, but the gameplay was a bit different and the pieces and strategy markedly so. Groves and M.B. were the only people on the ship who played it. It had not even been a component in the original brig chess program; Groves added it after M.B. inquired about the possibility.

It was interesting that, while M.B. knew the "Rove" she was playing with was the designer of the brig chess program, she probably had no idea who he actually was. His chosen nickname, Rove, was only an oblique reference to his own identity and was a word in its own right. Devoid of any context, it was hard to draw the connection.

In contrast, Groves knew full well he was playing against Michael Burnham. If the initials weren't clue enough, there was also the fact M.B. appeared shortly after Burnham's arrival on Discovery and the fact M.B.'s first few games had been against SILY: Burnham's roommate, Cadet Sylvia Tilly. (Also Groves' favorite player nickname, after his own.)

Really, the only players who knew Rove was Groves were NATE, MISH, LLNA, and probably SARU. NATE had been the reason he programmed brig chess in the first place. Sex and chess were the two things he and Egarova had bonded over in null time. At least he had been able to keep the chess component of the relationship going.

As far as M.B. went, Burnham was an excellent opponent, but Groves had learned early on that she had a serious problem with losing, so sometimes he had to let her win. The really hilarious thing was when he did, she would typically feel obliged to point out whatever "mistake" he had made, as if he needed her help to improve his intentionally torpedoed game. He could see why Saru had found her such a frustrating crewmate on the Shenzhou.

He wondered if he should let Burnham have this game or not. She was capable of beating him honestly, just not as frequently as she thought she did. He decided to give her a run for her money today.

* * *

The Mudd incident was shaping up to be a very interesting report for Starfleet. Lorca sipped his coffee as he reviewed it one more time, making sure the contents were unassailable while revealing only those details he thought Starfleet ought to know. There was no need to contradict the report on his time in Klingon prison by revealing Mudd's vengeance was borne of being deserted in that godforsaken place.

The door chimed. "Enter," said Lorca, looking away from the lights of the bridge for the brief moment the doors were open. When he looked back, he saw Mischkelovitz standing in the ready room, her hands pressed together in front of her in a way that resembled Lalana's expression of distress, minus the knocking motion. Her gaze was fixed firmly on the floor.

"Mischka," he greeted, wondering what she was doing up here. "Something wrong?" His first thought was that she had come to fret about the lului box.

She did not answer immediately. Her head twisted as she swallowed nervously. Her eyes scrunched shut. "Captain, I..." She swallowed again, her mouth dry. "I'm—I wanted to ask you something." Her hands twisted, the right one curling into a fist and then the left covering it, nails digging into her skin.

A question, not a guilty conscience. Not that it couldn't be both. "And you couldn't ask using the comm?"

"No!" There was real, palpable fear in her voice at that prospect.

"Is this about the lului device?" he asked. She shook her head softly. He held out a fortune cookie to lure her in. It worked, of course. She never declined them.

In this case, perhaps she should have. Her mouth was so dry she had trouble chewing and she asked with a trembling voice, "Water?"

He brought her half a glass of water and she downed it quickly and in one go, hands so tight around the glass it shook. Lorca leaned back against his desk and crossed his arms, looking down at her with a vaguely amused frown. The last time she had gotten like this, it was because she had misspoken his name. He really hoped this was some sort of greater problem than that, because otherwise this was getting a little ridiculous, mycelial map and mystery box be damned. "Do I need to call Mally or Groves up here?"

Again, her reply was instantaneous, but this time more horrified than afraid: "No!" Her hair bobbed as she shook her head again, more forcefully this time. "I just, I wanted to ask you something... something personal."

It was clear she was having a tremendous amount of difficulty. He reached out and took the glass from her, their fingers touching as he did. He could feel the tremble even from that brief contact. He put the glass safely on the table. "Go ahead."

Absent the glass, she clasped her hands in front of her, left over right again. "I didn't... with my husband... and so... I was wondering..."

His eyebrows shot up. Surely she didn't mean what that sounded like. Surely that wasn't the question she was asking.

"In the time loop, we all died, over and over again, and I don't want to, to die without ever actually... With another person..." She trembled almost from head to toe.

It definitely, definitely was. "Never?" he asked. She shook her head. _How in the hell can that be the case. This can't really be happening._ "Doctor. Are you asking me to have sex with you?"

"Yes, please." She lifted her eyes for the first time, looking up towards him with more hope than fear, but her hands were still shaking. "Please?"

It had not been easy for her to ask, and if he were a better man, he would probably have refused. But he wasn't. He smirked. "Okay."

All shivering ceased. She gasped and looked up, bright-eyed. "Really?"

He crossed his arms and smiled faintly. "My quarters, 2030." The smile on her face was irrepressible, even if there were still tears glinting in her eyes from anticipated rejection. "Now wipe your eyes and get back to work."

She did so, wiping her sleeve across her face as she bowed in appreciation. She actually _bowed_. "Thank you, captain!" She turned on her heel and fled as commanded.

Again, Lorca averted his eyes when the doors opened and closed. He returned to his usual place behind the desk and picked up with the report, but with only half a mind on the actual work at hand. A virgin. You didn't see those every day, especially on a starship. What in the hell had been wrong with Milosz.

O'Malley was probably going to kill him for this. Just another thing to add to his list of reasons to hate Lorca.

* * *

When Mischkelovitz returned, she was giddy and kept periodically bursting out into giggles but would not say why. Groves stared at her and asked her in qoryan what the big deal was.

She refused to answer.

Groves scratched at his wrists. There were no scars there—medical technology had taken care of that—but sometimes the skin still itched when he was frustrated, and this was very frustrating. The rules of qoryan stated that you were always supposed to speak the truth with it and to keep no secrets, because secrets were for outsiders, not for them.

Groves decided to speak some truth to her right now. "Li kat ma'soproht ze pakri makiin? Je ma ha't'rohti." _You think you can count me as an outsider? I'm us-but-older._

Mischkelovitz's eyes widened. "E'hhro ma'tiinen? Je ba kroht se bakiin!" _Aren't you cheating? You sound as if you didn't leave us!_

Groves scowled at that, because nothing served to guilt him so thoroughly as the fact he had left and none of them would ever let him forget it. "Esseren ma'so'prohti, xi'sohn." _I expect this cruelty from outsiders, monster._

"E prei'baroh. Se malotoh." _I'm sorry. You're right._ "Kii'reh pa'prossi je patrafah patrossen." _If I told you our plan it might change it._

Groves hummed thoughtfully. "Fair enough," he said. "Don't blame me when it blows up in your face because you didn't tell me."

Mischkelovitz stuck her tongue out at him. He stuck his out right back. As mature as ever, the pair of them.

They stayed in their respective corners for the rest of the day until O'Malley came to fetch them for dinner, or, as O'Malley described it while he and Groves fetched the trays and Mischkelovitz secured the table like a small and vicious guard dog, "Dinner as breakfast. It never gets old." O'Malley sighed.

Groves groaned. This was not the first time O'Malley had cracked that particular line. "You can ask the dispenser to make breakfast, you know. Or maybe you don't. I'm never quite sure exactly how dumb you are."

"Down, John," warned O'Malley as they headed for the table where Mischkelovitz was waiting. "You know Melly hates breakfast food. I'm not very well going to eat it in front of her."

Groves rolled his eyes. God forbid O'Malley do a single thing Mischkelovitz disagreed with. It was ridiculous, really, the lengths O'Malley would go to please certain people in the hopes of receiving their table scraps.

"We waiting for Saru?" asked Groves as they sat down.

"No, I asked him not to come today," said O'Malley.

"I thought he was your friend," said Groves.

Almost at the same time, Mischkelovitz went, "Why would you do that?"

O'Malley sat, fork in hand, feeling besieged on two sides, and said, "Has it ever occurred to you two there are things going on in my life that don't involve either of you?"

"Not really," said Groves.

"What does that mean?" asked Mischkelovitz, seeming genuinely confused.

O'Malley put his fork down, covered his face, and groaned. "You're children, both of you. I hate everyone today."

"Mally?" said Mischkelovitz. O'Malley's hands slid down and he peered out from between his fingers at her. "I love you."

O'Malley dropped his hands and smiled at her. She always knew the right thing to say to cheer him up, even if that was largely because it was always the same thing. "Just as much," he answered. "Now can we please eat quietly, peacefully for once? And maybe not judge me for twenty minutes?"

Mischkelovitz started tittering at that for reasons that made sense only to her. Groves knocked his knee against hers to get her to stop. The last thing any of them needed was a public bout of hysterics to draw attention to themselves. Also, laughter was dangerously contagious, and if Mischkelovitz went off, he might end up doing the same.

After dinner, Groves was officially released from his duties watching Mischkelovitz. He wandered over to the cargo bay to shoot some hoops. It was a bittersweet hobby. Absent anyone to play with growing up, he had no skill in the teamwork aspects of the game; all he really knew how to do was make shots of impressive technical precision. If only his childhood had provided the opportunity to pursue the sport. By the time they had all escaped, it was too late.

It was, he thought to himself as he flicked the ball towards the hoop and watched it soar in perfectly, always too late to change anything.

* * *

When Mischkelovitz left the lab again, O'Malley and Larsson were on the door.

"Where are you going?" asked O'Malley.

"Secret project update," she said.

He knew there was some secret project Lorca had her working on, but whatever it was, it was above his security clearance, so he left it and let Larsson go on break and stood there by himself trying to empty his mind of all thoughts. This worked only a little bit, so he switched mental tactics and pictured Aeree in the morning sunlight, beckoning him towards the bath. She was as beautiful as she was opaque, a mystery he had yet to solve. Maybe someday. He had no intention of giving up.

The proximity alert beeped in his left ear. Incoming. He turned his head and heard a familiar set of footsteps. Only one person on the ship had that stride. Saru.

Some part of O'Malley's heart sank.

"Colonel O'Malley," said Saru, inclining his head in greeting.

"Commander Saru," he replied, curtly. "Can I help you with something?"

"May we speak inside a moment?" asked Saru.

Some part of O'Malley really did not want to, but he owed Saru an explanation. He opened the outer doors and informed Larsson of his position.

"I apologize for disturbing you while you are on duty," said Saru as soon as the doors slid shut, "but I find myself concerned. I have very much valued our discussions and if I have done something to cause you offense..."

That was the worst conclusion Saru could have drawn. O'Malley felt genuinely bad for giving that impression. "No, you haven't."

"Why are you avoiding me, colonel?" Saru could be delightfully direct when he wanted.

O'Malley scrunched his nose. "It's not you I'm trying to avoid. It's me." He swallowed. "I'm not the man you think I am, Saru. I wish I were. I've done things. And I think... I've done something I can't come back from." His gaze fell towards the floor.

Saru considered that. "We have all made mistakes, colonel. Whatever you have done..." A shift came over Saru. He straightened. "You referred to me once as a 'unicorn.' This is a creature from Earth's mythology which is seen as being innocent and pure. I am neither innocent nor pure, colonel. In my brief time in command of Discovery, I knowingly inflicted suffering upon a sentient living being under the misguided belief that the ends would somehow justify those means. In doing so, I betrayed those ideals which I hold most dear. Furthermore, I did this to an alien who was gravely misunderstood by many, which is something I myself know all too well. I think, if I were to be in your interrogation room, you would not judge me an acceptable captain."

O'Malley took this in with an expression of spreading shock. "That's... The mere fact you'd think that says you'd never end up in the room with me. Ever. And I don't judge captains. That's not my job. Even if it were..." O'Malley's brow furrowed. "That's part of why people talk to me. Because I don't judge them. I give them exactly what they want. Understanding, forgiveness, and justification. And they impale themselves on it. Because I do everything I can to make sure the blow doesn't strike them in the heart."

There was something unclear in O'Malley's words, some combination of his analogy and his stated methodology. It did not sound like he was wholly engaged in the pursuit of justice. "I do not understand what you mean exactly."

"I mean I wish I were a callous bastard like some of the people who sit down across from me. I envy them their cruelty. It seems preferable."

Saru's head shifted right, then left. "Surely you do not mean that."

"Oh, no, I do. The problem with being a bleeding heart is that your heart constantly bleeds. Literally, in my case. I wish I could turn it off." O'Malley crossed his arms with his hands tucked under his arms defensively.

Saru stood quietly a moment. "I understand. Sometimes... I have sometimes wished I were a predator instead of being prey. The traits which predators have, their fearlessness and strength, these are qualities I lack, and which seem to make navigating the universe so much easier. And yet, if I were a predator, I would be both capable and culpable of causing pain and suffering in others. I do not wish that, having experienced it myself."

There was a twist of sympathy on O'Malley's face. "Do you know, the other meaning of unicorn was the one I meant. I know you're not innocent or pure or perfect, but you are something rare, Saru. You're incredibly brave. Bravest person on this ship, I should think."

Saru's head shook. "I am not brave."

"You are in the one way that really counts. You're honest. It takes a lot of bravery to admit your shortcomings, your weaknesses, and not just to others, but to yourself."

That did ring true. It also seemed applicable. Saru pressed his fingers together. "Perhaps it would be of benefit to you if you were to admit what it is has cast a cloud over you, colonel."

"I wish it were that easy."

"Perhaps it is."

"Tell me something. If you could do things over again with Ripper, knowing what you know now, would you still have used him the way you did?"

"I would not," said Saru with total certainty.

"See, that's the difference. I know what I did was wrong, and I'd still do it. I'd even do it a third time if it came down to it."

Saru was taken slightly aback. "Why, if you know it is wrong?"

"For the same reason anyone does anything crazy." O'Malley smiled in a way that suggested it was borne from a private thought. "Anyway. What's done is done and we can't change it. Probably better that way. We'd go mad if we could."

"Yes. We can only move forward and attempt to do better next time," said Saru.

"And that's why you'll never end up in my interrogation room. You don't need an interrogator. You own up to your mistakes and admit the things that weigh on you. Admitting things is the first step towards overcoming them. I wish I were as brave as you. And I really wish the captain were, too."

"Captain Lorca is one of the bravest captains I have ever met."

In many regards, this was true. Lorca had no fear of battle or death. He commanded with certainty and purpose. Yet it was also completely false. "But you see it, too, right? It's like there's a burden on his shoulders."

"There is no secret there," said Saru. "The destruction of the Buran weighs heavily on the captain."

O'Malley hummed faintly. "Mm, no, it's something else, something people don't know about. John's the same way. Whatever it was, it was so terrible he'll do anything to avoid talking about it for fear it'll be used against him. It's interesting. I've gotten some of the worst people ever to serve in Starfleet to open up to me even when it meant condemning themselves, and for the first time, I don't have to condemn anyone in any way, and he still won't open up."

Saru tilted his head again, stared at O'Malley with unblinking eyes. There was a clear difference between Lorca and captains being interrogated after the commission of crimes. Internal Security did not tend to arrest officers unless they were certain of their guilt. "That is because Captain Lorca still has something left to lose. If I may, colonel, as a species, my people have lost more than most. That is why it does not trouble me to be honest. I do not fear losing."

O'Malley blinked, gazing up at Saru with a sort of reverence. "You don't, do you?" This time, O'Malley's smile was genuinely pleased. "You know, you can call me Mac."

Informality did not come easily to Saru. "Very well, Mac."

"Someday I'll tell you what happened. I just hope you won't hate me for it when I do."

Saru was gratified by the words. "As someone who has also made mistakes, I do not think I could."

* * *

Lorca used everything he learned watching Mischkelovitz on the security feeds and then some. In human psychology, as with many other species, the first experience you had of something tended to be what defined it for you and Lorca was hell-bent on making this particular definition the best one possible. Mischkelovitz, for her part, brought a lot of medical and biological knowledge to the table. She was just missing the practical elements.

Which was why, at the end of it all, when Mischkelovitz rolled away and covered her face and started crying, he was genuinely disturbed by the reaction. He sat up. "Mischka." He touched her on the shoulder.

She recoiled and curled into a ball, shaking.

"What's wrong?" No answer. Her position and state seemed to indicate a deep shame. "Is it Milosz?"

"No!" she blurted through the tears. "I'm sorry, I'm so sorry. I don't mean to cry. You don't deserve this. You've been so kind."

Lorca raised an eyebrow. "I didn't do this to be kind. I was being selfish. I wanted to go where no man had gone before." It was, after all, the guiding mandate of Starfleet.

There was a momentary pause. Mischkelovitz inhaled sharply and a laugh choked out. Then another. She began to laugh hysterically in that way only she could. Her hands fell away from her eyes and her shoulders shook with genuine mirth.

He chuckled, too, and smiled. "And I'm your first. That means a part of you will always belong to me."

She wiped her eyes, still convulsing with paroxysms of laughter. "Thank you, Gabe. Sorry for crying." The laughter subsided and the tears were gone with it.

"Come here." He put his hand on her bare back and this time she did not recoil. She rolled back towards him and nestled against his shoulder. "I like that you can cry. At least one of us can." If he had been able to muster up the tears again, would Cornwell have forgiven him the phaser? Probably not, but maybe it would have helped. It certainly had back in San Francisco.

He felt a small vibration against his shoulder. Not movement, but sound. "What is that? Is that music?"

"Yes," she said. "If you lean in close, you can hear it." She shifted position upward, so her head was next to his, and Lorca pressed his ear against hers. There were small patterns of harplike sounds emerging from her implant.

"What is it?"

" _Mishima_."

The patterns repeated over and over, changing slightly as they did. "It's a little repetitive," admitted Lorca.

"I like repetition. Patterns are math. Math is everything."

There was something a little familiar in the phrasing. "Ask Stamets, and he'll tell you it's all mushrooms."

"Stamets can't see what I see."

Lorca smiled at that. It was a good thing Stamets' focus was so narrow. He was literally missing the bigger picture. "No, he cannot. How about you walk me through the latest revision of your map?"

* * *

It was a perfect way to end the evening. Lorca and Mischkelovitz both loved that map and when he asked her how many jumps she thought were needed to complete it, he found the answer high but completely within the realms of possibility.

One hundred and fifty jumps. That was what she estimated. The number echoed in Lorca's mind after Mischkelovitz departed his quarters. She insisted it was only an estimate, but she was good at estimates. If she thought that's what it would take, he had no doubt it would be the case.

One-hundred and fifty jumps was going to equal a lot of dead Klingons if Gabriel Lorca had anything to say about it.


	68. To Fill Up My Hand

A/N: Title is from "If You Go Away," the variant sung by Emiliana Torrini, et alii.

I really enjoyed fortune cookies before I started this fanfic. As of this chapter, I've eaten roughly fifty of them and the novelty has worn off. And yes, once again, 100% random draws that ended up unexpectedly apropos at a few spots.

* * *

Memory Alpha made sense as a four-person operation and Lalana suggested they each choose one person.

"This is not a democracy," said Lorca, fixing her with a wry frown. He was trying to be patient, but as usual she was not making it easy.

She looked down at him from her perch. "Einar can pilot the shuttle and provide his gun and that is one less person you need to allow to learn about me." At least she had not suggested O'Malley. He and Lorca were still avoiding each other.

Lorca considered Larsson. He was a solid security officer and, if Lorca was being honest, a good choice for all of Lalana's listed reasons. The problem was who to take as the fourth person if he accepted Larsson as part of the mission.

Some part of him really wanted to bring Michael Burnham, but he questioned if she would approve of the mission parameters. An unauthorized heist operation at the Federation's premiere cultural and scientific library? It seemed decidedly counter to Burnham's "I am Starfleet" principles.

He still wanted to bring her. He also wanted Ash Tyler because Tyler's loyalty was unquestionable and if Lorca asked him to help steal a strange alien box, Federation legal documents, and encrypted Starfleet personnel files, Tyler would do so without a second thought or request for any explanation.

Problem was, Tyler's skillset completely overlapped with Larsson's. They were both security officers who could pilot shuttles.

Lorca growled and covered his face with his hands. Lalana's tail brushed his shoulder.

"Tell me what you are thinking," she said.

"I'd rather have Tyler," said Lorca. "It's not that I don't like Einar, but..."

"Then bring Tyler."

"Tyler and Larsson do the same thing. We need a diversification of skills," he said. This was a very subtle way of addressing the fact he needed someone who could deftly navigate the notoriously immense Memory Alpha archives without tipping his hand as to why exactly such a person was necessary. Really, Airiam would be ideal, but she was entirely conspicuous and easily traced back to Discovery. Owosekun? Tilly? ... Was he seriously considering Cadet Sylvia Tilly right now?

He still wanted Tyler. If things went sideways, Tyler would sacrifice himself to protect Lorca. The same could not be said of most people. "I want Tilly and Tyler," he announced.

"That is five people," said Lalana, "unless you are not counting me as a person."

"We're not taking Larsson," said Lorca.

* * *

"I'm so happy I was picked for this mission! I can't believe I've gone from absolutely no mission experience to three away missions in the space of three months! And just a year ago I was still at the Academy!" This was not accounting for null time because, after considering the fact that her birthday had not changed, Tilly had decided that in a very real sense, null time did not really count.

"It's a big move up," agreed Tyler in the sort of patient tone that suggested he had come to like Tilly well enough as a friend to not be bothered by this burst of chatty enthusiasm.

"Did the captain tell you what the mission is?"

Tyler smiled at her. "I know exactly as much as you do."

The conference room doors opened. "Lieutenant Tyler, Cadet Tilly."

"Sir!" said Tilly, jumping up from her seat to attention. Tyler rose as well, but at a slower, normal pace, even though in his experience the conference room was not a location Lorca expected people to display such rigid formality.

"At ease, cadet," offered Lorca with a shake of his head. In addition to Tilly's usual overzealousness, they seemed to be short a person. "We're waiting on one more." He crossed his arms and checked the time. The whole point of arriving two minutes late was that the rest of the meeting's attendees were supposed to already be there.

"I just want to say what an honor this is, sir, to be selected..." The withering look on Lorca's face drained the enthusiasm from Tilly's voice. She managed to offer a small, unsteady "thank you" and shrank back into her seat. Tyler bit back a grin. He'd spent enough time with Lorca at this point to recognize the captain's sense of humor was sometimes a little bit cruel.

Finally, the doors opened. "Lieutenant Larsson," drawled Lorca with displeasure. "Good of you to finally join us."

Larsson shrugged at Lorca in a way that suggested he was not going to offer an explanation, which was fine, because Lorca had no interest in wasting any further time hearing one. Larsson took a seat on the side of the table opposite Tilly and Tyler.

Lorca remained standing. "Cadet, lieutenant. You are about to be read into a project aboard Discovery which only a handful of people know exists. This goes above and beyond the existence of the spore drive. When I say you can tell no one, I mean not your friends, not your roommate, not your lunch buddy." For Tyler and Tilly these three things described the same person: Michael Burnham. "Can you do that?"

"Of course, sir," said Tyler.

Tilly felt a shiver of excitement. The spore drive was already top secret to the extreme. It just so happened that everyone on Discovery knew about it because it affected the whole ship. This was clearly one of the myriad smaller projects that did not merit the knowledge of the ship at large, and since Tilly knew full well where Larsson was stationed, she had a pretty good guess what experiment it was. "My lips are sealed, sir!"

Tyler glanced over at Larsson. He noted Lorca had not said Larsson needed to be read in, and judging by the smug look on Larsson's face, this was entirely intentional.

"As I'm sure you're aware, there are a number of Federation projects working to break through the Klingons' cloaking technology. Here on Discovery, we have one of our own. Computer, lock doors, my override, and open a visual to Lab 26, section two."

A pair of giant green eyes set into soft grey-blue fur appeared on the monitor. "Greetings, Ash Tyler and Sylvia Tilly. My name is Lalana. It is an absolute pleasure to meet you."

* * *

The mission parameters were deceptively simple. "We're going to pick something up from Memory Alpha. Now, because we suspect our transit protocols have been breached—which would explain my being scooped up by Klingons not too long ago—we're going in totally dark. This mission is too important to risk any word of it getting back to the Klingons and we are the only ship that can get this cargo where it needs to go without risk of interception."

There were a lot of specifics to go over. They were fabricating a fake lului box to take the place of the one currently abandoned by Federation researchers so no one would notice the real box had gone missing until a more thorough examination of the box at some future point, ideally after the war and potentially providing an opportunity for the real box to be returned without anyone the wiser. For their cover story, they were delivering an alien cultural data core in a crate somewhat larger than was necessary. Then there was the shuttle, which was being temporarily disguised as part of Starfleet's general transport fleet rather than a shuttle from Discovery.

It was a beautifully complicated, thorough plan with contingencies upon contingencies, though many of those alternative details Lorca kept to himself for use if the need arose. The better part of tactical brilliance was internal preparation, and the smaller but potentially more impressive part was knowing what contingencies everyone needed to know beforehand and which ones were best kept in the back pocket to be pulled out when needed.

Lorca provided Stamets the coordinates and watched Stamets' eyes widen. "This is... this is halfway across the quadrant!"

"We can break it into smaller jumps if it's too far."

Stamets considered that. "The more jumps we do, the greater the chance of detection." Lorca had made abundantly clear the need for this mission to be invisible. The coordinates were not even to be shared with the rest of Stamets' engineering team.

"And in the event of an emergency, we're gonna want to jump all the way back," noted Lorca.

Stamets' head shook with disbelief, but it was more a way of clearing that disbelief than succumbing to it. "Well, all right. I guess if it's not going to be possible, we may as well figure it out on the way there. And possibly all die in the process!" In his new, mycelially-charged state of mind, Stamets did not sound overly bothered by the prospect. It was a far cry from that first test when Lorca had suggested Stamets ought to press the button in case the drive killed them all.

Lastly, there was also the matter of the real reason Lorca had agreed to this entire charade. He pulled Tilly aside. "I'm giving you a secondary objective, cadet. You know your way around the Memory data archives, don't you?"

She did. She had used them extensively at the academy and continued to take advantage of every educational reference that might prove useful to her current work with the mycelium spore drive. The indices at Memory Alpha were notoriously convoluted, but someone who had used the system as much as Tilly had stood a fair chance of gathering the information needed in a reasonable amount of time. "Sir?"

"I need a few files. Preferably without a repeat of that little debacle in the engineering lab. Remember that?"

Tilly paled. That moment before Discovery's initial spore jump test remained one of her more unfortunate memories on the ship.

"Sir, I... In light of that, maybe, maybe I'm not the right person for this mission."

"Oh, you are. Because I know you won't make the same mistake twice." Lorca smiled at her, reminding her of the moment they had first met in front of Starfleet Headquarters.

Tilly realized it was a chance to redeem herself. That time in the engineering lab, she had been so flustered and eager to impress she had tripped over herself. In the time since, she had devised an anti-spore that helped free them from null time, helped ascertain what had happened to the Glenn, and most recently accompanied Burnham in the nebula to save Sarek. She had a better sense now what she was capable of. "I won't let you down, sir!"

"The files I need you to get are gonna seem a little strange, but I need them for a good reason. I also need you to keep every detail about these files to yourself. You can't tell anyone what they are, or even that I asked you to get them." Lorca took a deep breath. "I'm trusting you with this, Tilly."

Tilly watched Lorca's smile disappear into an expression of grim resignation and realized this was something important to Lorca. When he said he was trusting her, he really meant it. She hesitated, wavered a moment in light of that responsibility, then looked at Lorca with confidence and determination. That look told Lorca everything he needed to know. When she spoke, her voice was filled an earnest resolve to match. "How high would you like me to jump, sir?"

Lorca smiled. Perfect.

* * *

They disabled Discovery's transponder, left the relay in the asteroid field as a decoy, and prepared to jump. Saru took command of Discovery from the bridge while Lorca made a final check of preparations in the shuttlebay, Tilly and Tyler at his side. "Looks like we've got everything, sir," said Tilly. She was responsible for the decoy lului box and false data core.

"Almost," said Lorca, tugging at the cuffs of the environmental suit that would serve as his disguise. Tyler smiled. With the helmet on, no one was even going to suspect Lorca was human, much less recognize him as Discovery's captain. Tyler moved to do a system check at the shuttle controls.

The crucial thing they were missing was the guest of honor. The shuttlebay doors opened. Lalana and Larsson arrived.

Lalana immediately leapt as far as she could across the breadth of the shuttlebay, surprising Tilly with the display. "It is so good to jump again!" she exclaimed, loping over to Lorca with full-length strides.

"Guess you've been cooped up a while," said Lorca. While Lalana never complained about the confinement, there was hardly space in the lab for any sort of acrobatics. "We've got a few minutes. Have at it."

Lalana spun her hands and immediately began bounding across the shuttlebay, jumping, running, and rolling with enthusiasm. Lorca chuckled. Tilly's eyes tracked Lalana's every move with rapt amazement.

Larsson joined them at the shuttle, only provisionally interested in their state of readiness. He was holding a thermal suit for Lalana. "Looks like I got my promotion," he commented to Lorca, pretending to dust off the lieutenant commander pips on his badge.

"Despite your ongoing tardiness," said Lorca, fixing Larsson with a frown. Larsson smirked. This assignment was only ever temporary for him. After the war's end, he was going to leave Starfleet again and write another book.

From the bridge, Saru reported they were ready to make the jump. Lorca reminded Saru he was in command and it was his call.

"Yes, of course," said Saru. Lorca could not see the way Saru's fingers tightened on the arms of the captain's chair. For three hours he was again going to be in command without any oversight or ability to consult Lorca, and this time he was going to make sure there were no mistakes. "Very well. Black alert."

They jumped. Lorca checked the nearest console and confirmed they were at the intended coordinates, though the majority of the ship had no clue what those coordinates were. "Lorca to Stamets. How'd it go?"

There was a delay before Stamets responded and a slightly dazed tone to Stamets' voice that gave Lorca concern. "We made it!" said Stamets. "I just need..." He did not say what he needed.

Tilly registered concern. "Lieutenant? Are you okay?" she asked.

"I'm totally fine, captain. Just a little thirsty."

"Be ready to jump again in three hours," said Lorca. It was the amount of time allocated for this excursion.

"Three hours," echoed Stamets. "Oww-ers. How-ers?"

Lorca frowned. "Lorca out."

Tilly chewed her lip. "He just gets a little disoriented after a jump sometimes, and that was a big jump," she said after a moment, reassuring herself as much as Lorca. Stamets was acting as a biocomputer in a way no one ever had before; a few hiccups were to be expected.

Lalana bounded back over to Lorca. "I suppose it is time for us to go. Einar?" Larsson handed Lalana her thermal suit. The design and material were unfamiliar to Lorca. It was silvery and lightweight and the material clung to Lalana snugly when she stepped into it. There was a hum and her epithelial filaments emerged through a microscopic mesh. She shifted color to pink and then yellow. As she did, the reflective qualities of the material seemed to take on the same color she did. In other words, a thermal suit that could change color with her.

"Oh my gosh!" went Tilly. "That is so cool."

"Actually, it is very warm," said Lalana, "which is important because otherwise I might freeze to death in the event of an emergency."

Ridiculous, as usual. "Time to go," Lorca informed them. Tilly and Larsson took their seats.

Lalana hung back with Lorca at the shuttle's rear as he closed the door. "A word?" she asked.

Lorca told Tyler to take off. The shuttle rose smoothly into the air and slid out into vacuum of space. Lorca looked down at Lalana. "What is it?"

"I have noticed a certain degree of dissatisfaction during our preparations for this mission. Was it truly so bad that I insisted on bringing Einar?"

Lorca shook his head. "It's fine." Lalana had made a clear case that, as much as Tyler was Lorca's man, Larsson was hers, and she trusted him to protect her as Tyler did Lorca. Yes, the mission now had five people, but that was an acceptable compromise.

"Then, is it Michael Burnham?"

Lorca's mouth fell open in surprise. "How did you..."

"You have often spoken of her capabilities, and indeed, have sent her on every away mission since she arrived on Discovery, but for this one, you chose Cadet Tilly, even though Burnham's qualifications exceed Tilly in this area, as in most. Why?" Lorca did not immediately answer, frowning and looking away. He could not say that the problem was Burnham asked too many questions and he was secretly using Tilly to steal files relating to Lalana's labmates. Lalana tilted her head. "It is all right, you do not have to answer. But we are supposed to be enjoying ourselves, so put aside the fact Burnham is not with us and let us have some fun!"

The smile on Lorca's face was irrepressible. Fun, indeed. "All right, everyone," he announced, moving into the main part of the shuttle and grabbing the box of fortune cookies he had stashed earlier. They each took one.

"Be moderate where pleasure is concerned, avoid fatigue," read Tilly aloud.

Tyler had "Your work interests can capture the highest status or prestige," while Larsson's was "For better luck, you have to wait till spring."

"Sing and rejoice, fortune is smiling on you," said Lalana. "That is a lovely sentiment, though, I cannot sing."

Lorca smirked. Lalana seemed to end up with fortunes that did not apply to her on a regular basis. He revealed his own fortune. "All your hard work will soon pay off."

"Damn it," said Larsson. "Why does everyone else have a good fortune except me?"

"Is mine good?" asked Tilly doubtfully, squinting at it.

"No," Larsson told her, "but it is not as bad as mine. God damn it! Give me another one." Lorca took pity on Larsson. Larsson broke open the cookie with such abandon crumbs got everywhere. He stared at the new paper, still displeased.

"What does it say?" asked Tilly. Larsson handed it to her. "Your principles mean more to you than any money or success. That's really good!"

"Bah," said Larsson, still displeased, "then you have it."

"You know what brings good luck, Larsson?" said Lorca. "Being on time when your captain calls a meeting." Lalana clicked her tongue and rolled back on her tail and Lorca chuckled, too. When Lorca sat down in the back corner away from the rest of them, Lalana hopped onto the seat next to him as if it were the most natural place in the world for her to be. They traded their fortunes so Lalana's no longer called upon her to sing and started talking about the subject of singing and how it was completely beyond a lului to do.

Tilly watched Lorca and Lalana with wide blue eyes. Lorca was an imposing, terrifying, and inspiring captain who challenged everyone and often demanded the impossible. He was also the sort of captain who had risked everything to save Sarek and the colonists on Corvan and fought Starfleet Command at every available opportunity for the chance to save even more lives, so she knew he was an incredibly brave and heroic person, but through it all, he had always seemed an aloof figure, entirely removed from the crew. Despite having a reputation for being darkly funny (especially according to the bridge crew, who had the most experience with him), Lorca made being captain look like something that was brutally hard and lonely.

Now, looking at Lorca, Tilly realized he was something else in addition to being Discovery's awe-inspiring captain. He was also someone's friend. She smiled and looked down at the fortune in her hands. Someday, she was going to be a captain, and it was nice to see the role did not require the removal of all personal connections, even for a captain like Gabriel Lorca.

* * *

To say security at Memory Alpha was lax was an understatement. The facility was a cultural and scientific archive of no strategic value on the far side of the Federation from the Klingon Empire. They landed the shuttle after a cursory ident check, walked out with the crate past a pair of armed guards, and the attendant on duty noted there were no deliveries scheduled but was not bothered by this in the slightest.

The first curveball came when, while the attendant tried to figure out where exactly they should go with their unscheduled delivery, a woman entered the room and announced, "I'll take it from here, Govender."

The attendant looked up. "Sure, Dr. Stewart."

The woman looked at them. She was tall and thin, with long brown hair swept up into a tidy twist, a medium complexion, and persistently weary brown eyes. "Come with me," she said.

Larsson, being visibly the oldest and wearing the lieutenant commander pips for precisely this reason, strode after her entirely unbothered, forcing the rest of them to follow his lead. Underneath the environmental helmet, Lorca grimaced. Something was up.

She took them down a broad hallway past various academics. Some of them looked at Lorca's environmental suit and wondered what species he was underneath, but none of them really had any interest in these Starfleet visitors or the crate they were escorting. The woman led them to an offshoot of the main hallway otherwise devoid of people.

Either sensing or sharing Lorca's misgivings, Tyler asked, "Where are we going?"

"A storage room adjacent to the main access shaft," said the woman. "You'll be able to go wherever you need from there."

Lorca put a hand on Tyler's shoulder. "Stop," he said, the environmental suit rendering this into a buzzing voice.

They all stopped. The woman turned and looked at Lorca with an expression of boredom that felt unsettlingly familiar. "We're almost there. Let's keep going. I have other things I need to be doing." She resumed walking. Tyler gave Lorca a confused look and Lorca dropped his hand away, indicating they should continue following the woman for now. Lorca put a hand on the phaser at his hip just in case.

The promised storage room turned out to be a maintenance room with independent turbolift access. The woman secured the door behind them with an access code. "You can take that off now, captain. No monitors in here."

Tyler and Tilly looked to Lorca for some sign as to what they were going to do. Taking the helmet off meant removing his hand from his phaser, but if nothing else, they had the numbers, so Lorca did so. "Who the hell—"

"Dr. Danica Stewart." She crossed her arms and Lorca noticed her right hand was deformed, short one finger. Judging by the anatomy, the absence was the result of a birth defect, not an accidental amputation. She was quite attractive despite the abnormality. There was birdlike grace to her features. "Where's the... Lalana, is it?" The way she pronounced the name indicated she had heard it spoken aloud properly rather than read it on some report.

Something clicked in Lorca's head. He wrenched the crate open. "Lalana!" The false foam top of the crate tipped aside as Lalana sat up. "What the hell are you playing at!"

Lalana looked at Stewart, then at Lorca. "Who is this?" Her response only raised Lorca's hackles further and he put his hand back on his phaser. He continued to resist the urge to actually draw his weapon until such time as it became necessary. His propensity for pulling a phaser had gotten him into enough trouble recently.

Stewart scoffed. "Typical Rove. He didn't tell you, did he?"

"Rove?" repeated Tilly. "As in, brig chess Rove?"

Something else clicked in Lorca's head at the mention of the brig because there was one person he had famously put in the brig who was tall and thin and had weary-looking brown eyes. Dr. Stewart looked like a female version of John Groves. Lorca was momentarily repulsed by the fact he had thought her attractive. Now that he had made the connection, it was impossible not to look at her and see Groves' smirking face staring back. Lorca ground his teeth. "He didn't say anything, so how about you start."

* * *

John Groves, it turned out, was useful in unexpected ways. Having gleaned the fact they were going to Memory Alpha, he had contacted Stewart and arranged for her to assist with their mission. In his usual mischievous fashion he had neglected to inform anyone from Discovery he had done this.

It was annoying, but there was something poetic about Groves accidentally helping Lorca steal the sealed legal records and Stewart was an entirely useful resource. She gave them her security access codes and rode with them in the turbolift down towards the archive level housing the lului box.

"If this 'Rove' contacted you about us coming," said Tyler, concerned, "does that mean there's a communication detailing our mission somewhere?"

"I wouldn't worry about that," said Stewart. "It was in qoryan, so there isn't a translator in existence can tell you what the message said, and only six people alive can even speak it."

Six people. Groves, Mischkelovitz, Stewart, and three others. "Including O'Malley?" asked Lorca, recalling O'Malley's halting attempts to do just that.

Stewart scoffed harder this time. "Macarius O'Malley? You think Macarius O'Malley can speak qoryan?" She started to laugh so hard she had trouble speaking. "He, he, he, he, he, he doesn't have the genes for it!" She doubled over, took a sharp breath, and held it, stopping her laughter abruptly.

The turbolift arrived at its destination. Stewart held the door for them but made no move to exit the lift herself. "After you leave, I'll replace all security footage for the duration of your stay with footage from another day. Can one of you deliver a message to Rove for me?"

"Certainly," said Lalana.

"Tell him, _aik'rok mak'ti'teronn, je ma kroh se basiil_."

Lorca would have needed to hear that again several times, but Lalana went, "Aik'loq mak-klee-tle-lonn, je mah kloh se basiil?"

"Exactly," said Stewart, even though Lorca could clearly hear several changes in the way Lalana had said it. "You can remember that?"

"I can. Aik'loq mak-klee-tle-lonn, ja mah kroh se pasiil." Again, it seemed to have shifted on Lalana's tongue. It was possible Lalana was saying it exactly the same way but the translator was shifting the syllables in the process of trying to turn it intelligible. That, or the words were just too hard for Lalana to say accurately.

"Say it just like that and he'll understand," Stewart assured. The turbolift doors closed.

As they made their way down the hall, Lorca asked, "Did you understand what she said?" Lalana had been in the lab with Mischkelovitz and Groves for months.

"Not at all," said Lalana. "I have tried to figure out that language, but it is entirely beyond me. Which is very odd because I am quite good at languages. I can usually understand them even if I cannot speak them. Yet theirs escapes my understanding."

And apparently, O'Malley did not have the genes for it. Lorca recalled the comment O'Malley had made about the ban on genetic engineering complicating his life.

Qoryan, he realized, was a genetic language. How exactly it worked and why that would preclude the universal translator from fully translating it, Lorca was not sure, but it was another piece of the puzzle solved, and a whole new set of questions raised that Lorca was very much looking forward to getting the answers to at long last.

The lului box was exactly where it was supposed to be. They replaced it without much fanfare. Groves' interference had turned what was supposed to be a moderate-risk heist into something entirely banal, rendering most of Lorca's planning and preparation entirely moot. Maybe that was why Groves had done it. This was the equivalent of deflating Lorca's basketball.

"Cadet, go check for any relevant files," said Lorca, which was Tilly's cue to head to the nearby console and begin delving for the data Lorca wanted.

Lorca crossed his arms and scowled, silently cursing Groves for ruining all the fun. Then he heard Lalana say, "Einar, why don't we go find some material for your next book?" That snapped Lorca out of his fuming disappointment.

"What?"

The answer which followed this inquiry was entirely unexpected. "There is a secret section below the Daystrom level of the archives which should have many interesting things for Einar to write about! I discovered it when I was conducting my initial survey of Federation worlds. Would you like to come with us?"

"We don't have time for a wild goose chase," said Lorca. This was not entirely true. It would probably take Tilly more than twenty minutes to dig up all the files he wanted, in which case this side trip could potentially play to Lorca's advantage and provide Tilly all the time she needed.

Or it could blow up in their faces. Not that there seemed to be any real danger. Even without Stewart, they had been on the verge of simply walking into Memory Alpha to steal the lului box uncontested. The place was no fortress.

Lorca recalled the fortunes in the shuttle. The slips of paper were not necessarily reflective of reality, but it felt a little like the hand of fate was reaching out to him with an offering. His tone shifted to curiosity and he asked, "What's in this secret section?"

* * *

It appeared to be a dead-end hallway slated for expansion down the line, like so many other hallways in the sprawling underground labyrinth of Memory Alpha's archives, but Lalana swore it was hiding a special sealed chamber storing Federation secrets and that "The Secret History of the Federation" would make a very fine book. Lorca was not entirely certain what to make of her assertion. Federation secrets hiding right under everyone's noses? It was either impossibly brilliant, using the entire Memory Alpha facility like a false foam layer in a crate, or entirely far-fetched.

What was clear was that the corridor held no secret doors or buttons. A quick scan confirmed the hall ended in solid bedrock.

"The air system," said Lalana. "That was how I got in last time." They removed a pair of panels near the ceiling and Lalana hopped onto Larsson's shoulders and into the duct.

Lalana's head appeared in the gap left by the missing panels. "Do you know, I think you can fit in here. I am not sure how the area is normally accessed, but perhaps if you come through with me we can find the way out."

"Tyler, you go," said Lorca.

Tyler, true to form, did not hesitate at the order. Lorca and Larsson hefted him up into the ventilation system. Tyler disappeared, crawling after Lalana, the only evidence of his progress fading sounds of scraping through the duct. Two minutes later, Lalana was back. "We have encountered an independent power system with security measures. Tyler wishes to know what you would like him to do. You should come and see for yourself."

"Can he disable it?"

"He thinks so."

"Then have him do it."

Lalana did not move to relay this order. Instead she stared at him, her head sticking down from the ceiling. He threw his hands up expectantly at her, waiting for her to go. She said, "I did not realize you were claustrophobic."

Lorca squinted at her with confused disgust. "I'm not." He simply thought crawling through the vents was entirely undignified.

"Macarius is frightened of small spaces, too. How strange that you have this in common! But then, it is a very normal human weakness, is it not? Now I understand why I never have seen you voluntarily move into a space of this size. Do not worry. There is no shame in being afraid of small places. It is only human. You do not have to prove yourself to me or anyone else in this regard. If anything, I am pleased to know that you have this weakness. Because of it, Tyler and I will take care of this situation for you."

As Lalana spoke, Lorca's eyes narrowed. He wondered what it would take to convince her the error of her ways and decided a demonstration would probably do the trick. He turned to Larsson. "Leg," he growled through gritted teeth. His ascent was somewhat less graceful than Tyler's, but they managed.

His regret at this course of action was immediate. The duct was cramped and uncomfortable, illuminated only by a light source Lalana held aloft in her tail for his benefit. As he crawled along behind her, Lorca grumbled, "Why did I let you talk me into this."

"Because you wanted to have an adventure," said Lalana.

His elbow banged the side of the duct. "Next time I want to have an adventure, remind me I'm not twenty-five anymore."

"You are still young, at least compared to me. Though, I am also glad that you are not twenty-five. The face you have now is so much more interesting. All of the little lines are so beautiful. Especially when you laugh or you smile."

Lorca stopped, staring at her in mild surprise. She twisted so her eyes were looking back at him, the light gleaming in the reflection of her compound irises. As uncomfortable as he was, he smiled genuinely and a little helplessly at the compliment.

"Yes, exactly so," she said, and continued forward.

Lorca sighed softly with contentment and resumed crawling. The face he saw in the mirror nowadays was so far removed from the face of his youth, with wrinkles that had not been there ten, twenty years ago. He was never quite certain how he felt about the wrinkles. On the one hand, they represented the loss of youth and peak physical prowess. On the other, they were a mark of accomplishment and achievement above and beyond what he ever could have dreamed. It was oddly gratifying to know someone found those wrinkles beautiful. Even if that someone was an alien whose concept of beauty was entirely inhuman.

The ventilation duct terminated in a small chamber three meters wide and just tall enough to sit in. Most of the chamber was occupied by an air circulator strong enough to move the hair on Lorca's head. Tyler was on the far side of the circulator, crouching next to a continuation of the ventilation shaft. "Captain!" he said, surprised to see Lorca.

"What've we got," prompted Lorca.

What they had was an active defense system of anti-vermin lasers covering the opening to the next area. It was drawing power from whatever mysterious source was also powering the circulator. The circulator also had a secondary power backup. Whoever had designed this place seemed to have a real fear of suffocation.

"Can you disable it?"

"I think so," said Tyler. "But there's a risk it'll release a charge, so maybe you should stay back."

Sitting hunched in the corner opposite was only marginally more comfortable than crawling through the vents. Lorca leaned back against the bedrock. The icy chill of the stone was barely perceptible through the material of his environmental suit but shockingly sharp against the back of his head. "You cold?" he asked Lalana.

"This suit is heated. It creates a thermal air buffer, and if an area is too cold, I can withdraw my filaments within it." She moved beside him. He could feel the warmth she described about as much as he could the cold. "Of course, there are more enjoyable ways to keep warm."

Lorca smirked. "Yes, there are."

Then she said quietly, "You should spend the night with me when we get back."

"If we get back," he replied, trying to dismiss the subject with a bit of gallows humor. "There's still a chance Tyler mucks up and kills us." Anti-vermin lasers were unlikely to kill them unless Tyler somehow triggered a catastrophic overload of the entire power system.

Lalana leaned in close and said in a voice the translator rendered as a whisper only he could hear, " _When_ we get back, come to my quarters. I will curl your toes and make you scream with pleasure. I know every spot that you enjoy and I will dance across them all like a spider on a web of its own design." Lorca tried to keep a straight face and failed miserably.

Lalana brushed her tail across his ear and down the side of his neck, doing something with her filaments that made Lorca gasp audibly. The sound caused Tyler to look in their direction. Lorca hastily covered the indiscretion up with a cough until Tyler turned back to disarming the lasers, then hissed at Lalana, "Your quarters are _swelteringly_ hot."

"I do so enjoy the way you sweat. And so will you," she promised, spinning her hands.

There was a small fizzling sound followed by a pop. "I got it," announced Tyler. Lorca did not answer. Tyler looked over at them both again and noticed Lorca looked vaguely shell-shocked.

"Well, look at that," said Lalana gamely, "we are not dead."

* * *

They emerged from the latter part of the ventilation ducts into a darkened area filled with crates and shelves stacked many items deep. The chamber was long and narrow like a subway tunnel. Their lights swept across and revealed a set of console stations set up at various intervals along the middle of the chamber. There was a single transporter pad at the end closest to them. Apparently the transporter was the usual method of access, which made sense, because aside from the ventilation system they had come through, every other part of the chamber was solid rock.

"What the hell is this?" asked Lorca, looking at the markings on the crates. They were strings of letters and numbers but no other markings. Some sort of classification system.

"Should we open one?" asked Tyler.

"Check the console first," said Lorca. "And see if you can find some lights."

Lalana strode through the stacks of crates and bins and called out, "Close your eyes! I see light controls." Lorca preemptively did as suggested. When the lights came up, it stung a little even through his eyelids, but then the lights dimmed to the level Lalana knew Lorca preferred and he opened his eyes.

The chamber was perhaps twenty meters long and seven meters wide. Everything in it was hidden in a container. There were hundreds of containers of various sizes. Tyler activated the nearest console.

Lorca joined Tyler at the console. "What do we have?"

"I need a password to get into any files, but I can view the directory." The filenames seemed to feature the same combination of letters and numbers as the crates themselves.

"Then we'll do this the old-fashioned way," said Lorca.

"Should we not beam Einar in?" suggested Lalana.

Larsson arrived a moment later, looking quite pleased at having avoided the indignity of crawling through the ceiling. "Remote activation protocols in the transporter," noted Tyler. "It requires some sort of access key to be triggered from the outside." At least the manual overrides meant there would be no need for a repeat of the vent performance. The humans would be able to beam out at their leisure.

Lorca opened a crate. It contained an assortment of decorative objects that seemed to have come from an office. There was a splatter of time-blackened blood across an old, two-dimensional photo in a frame. The subject of the photo was wearing a Starfleet uniform about fifty years out of date. More blood stained an old leather desk pad. There was even a pot with soil and the remnants of a plant stalk sticking up from it. The leaves had long since turned to dust.

He tried a bin on a shelf next. It contained several biological sample kits with biohazard seals on them. Every one of the seals was broken. Lorca would have been alarmed, but the kits were a few decades old and no effort had been made to quarantine them, indicating they were unlikely to still contain whatever samples they once had.

"Tyler, can you tell what was added most recently?" Tyler read off some number and letter combinations. Lorca scanned the room and located a letter and number set that would seem to be more recent. Inside the crate he found a pair of fully modern plasma coils bearing marks of an explosion.

This place, Lorca realized, was steeped in secrets. He spotted another recent-ish ID number on a small box high on a shelf. He pulled it down and found it contained a set of handwritten books, journals. He scanned a few entries. The writer seemed to have served on a starship, but all relevant names had been abbreviated with initials, so it was hard to know exactly who the writer was or the crew he had served with. Most of the writing was fairly rote and described everyday events in a straightforward manner, but the last journal in the set was an entirely emotional confession in which the writer outlined his many regrets in life. Lorca thumbed through it with gloved hands.

" _...all that time I wasted, and for what? I'd like to say it was out of a desire to display professionalism, but I've never thought any of my fellows unprofessional for their conduct, and I'm forced to conclude in the worst way possible that what I actually was was afraid and I've sacrificed a whole life to that fear and have nothing to show for it. People will look at my life and think I lived it well. 'Look at him, he did so much.' I actually did very little of note or consequence. My family will probably chuck this into a bin with the rest of my belongings and donate it after I'm gone. I had better make clear that they ought to burn these books for the good of us all._ " The missive to burn the books for the collective good had been bolded and underlined. Apparently it had not been followed.

A little further down, the author realized, " _I told myself I was writing it for them but I'm really just doing this for myself. When I'm gone, there will be no one who really knew me who will remember me, and I want to pretend that's not the case, but it is. I hope someone someday reads this and knows me, because no one knew me while I was alive. That's all anyone really wants, I think. To be known."_

It continued like this at length. Lorca turned a few more pages and was about to put the book down when the words "she loved the stars" caught his eye.

" _I've just come back from the pub. I met a woman this evening. No—to call her that belies the truth of her existence. She was a miracle. A woman who understood me without needing to be told, and in her a sorrow that mirrored my own._

" _Where she came from, I couldn't say. I didn't ask; it seemed imprudent. She was only passing through, here for one night to visit family in the area. We shared a drink together and sat, talking. She loved the stars. She knew I served in Starfleet didn't but pry into it the way most people do when they meet me. She didn't have a million questions of what it was like to live on a starship or force me to retell any of those awful little anecdotes I've told so many times I almost believe them myself._

" _I keep thinking over our conversation. There are so many things I would have asked her, if I were a braver or a better man. What was her life like, the daily banalities and frustrations and ever-fleeting joys? What were her ideals? Instead, we talked of loneliness, and love, and longing, and belonging. We spoke of these things, and it felt for a moment like immortality. I'm glad I met her, even if it was but for a single night. I doubt I'll ever cross paths with her again. We met, we spoke, we drank, and we parted back to our respective lives._

" _It was such a modest, reasonable, intelligent talk._ "

That was how the passage ended, on an entirely strange little out-of-place sentence that described the referenced discussion without really saying anything about it. Lorca turned to the last page. The final words were, " _It was a lonely life, but it was mine._ "

Lorca put the journal down. Despite the fact it was being stored in this strange location with all these things that felt a lot like evidence of crimes, the only crime these journals would seem to indicate was that the writer had lived an unsatisfying life.

"A halo of stars!" Lorca heard Lalana say. She was standing beside a large crate with a letter-number combination that looked bright and new. The code on the crate read "X102-TR-1116-M-LR-5."

The crate contained some sort of scientific equipment. It was all in pieces. Larsson picked up one of the larger components.

"Put it down," said Lorca. "It's time to go."

"But we have only just arrived," said Lalana.

"This is some sort of repository of criminal evidence," said Lorca. "We don't know what any of these crimes are, but we probably shouldn't be touching the evidence."

"Shit," said Larsson, and rubbed the object with his sleeve to remove any fingerprints.

"You're just getting more DNA on it," Lorca informed him. "Skin cells, hair filaments, clothing fibers... Close the damn crate."

* * *

They waited in the hallway for Lalana to return through the ventilation system. Larsson started walking off. "Where are you going," Lorca demanded.

"Bathroom," said Larsson. "Unless I now need a captain's permission to pee."

"When it comes down to it, yes."

Larsson stared. "May I use the toilet facilities, _sir?_ "

"Go," said Lorca, wishing he had had not let Lalana bring Larsson along. What had Larsson contributed exactly? His services as a human ladder on a side trip that had not provided them with anything of real interest.

Lalana emerged from the ceiling and Tyler replaced the panels they had removed. At some point, someone was going to realize the vermin defense system to that room had been compromised, but the way things at Memory Alpha were run, it would probably be a long time coming.

Tilly was right where they had left her. She greeted Lorca with a proud smile on her face suggesting she had gotten all the files requested. Larsson turned up again and they made their way back to the shuttle with the lului box safely tucked away alongside Lalana in the crate. They did not see Stewart on the way out, but Lorca assumed the woman was as good as her word where the security footage was concerned.

All the way back, Lalana sat with Tilly and let the cadet pepper her with roughly a thousand questions about lului. Lorca sat in the same far corner as before, roughly as far from Tilly as possible, and kept his own counsel. The trip had not been as much fun as he hoped but there had been a few standout moments. Part of his mind was still in the ventilation systems, thinking about spiders and the sensation of epithelial filaments on his ear.

Which was why he did not notice the silent exchange that passed between Larsson and Lalana. Larsson went to stand behind the copilot seat and look out the front window, crossing his arms and surreptitiously tapping his finger four times against his elbow. Lalana did not signal back, but she knew exactly what the message was and spun her hands because she was entirely pleased about it.

They had brought back a good deal more than the lului box from Memory Alpha.

* * *

They made it back to Discovery with twenty minutes to spare on their three-hour timetable. Lorca was relieved to be back on the ship. The ship felt safer than anywhere else in the universe.

As they unloaded, Mischkelovitz came running into the shuttlebay. "Captain! Captain!" she shouted. "It's music! The answer is music!" She ran right up to Lorca, grabbed his left hand, and shook it with excitement. "The music in my ears! Remember, you said the music in my ears was repetitive! It is, it's repetitive! We don't need to make our own music! We can change what's already there! We just need to change the pattern of the existing music!"

Lorca stared at her, not sure what she expected him to say to this seemingly random burst of information. Mischkelovitz pulled his hand up to the side of her head and pressed it twice against her ear.

"Do you see? The music!"

Lalana hopped over. "Emellia, what are you talking about?"

Mischkelovitz realized they did not understand. "Music! The interstellar music! It's already there, we just have to change it!" She released Lorca's hand and started shaking her arms in agitation. Why didn't they understand what she was saying? Her eyes began to water with frustration. Lorca, Lalana, Tyler, and Tilly all stared in confusion.

Larsson pushed past Lorca. "Hey, Mischka, let's go see your boyfriend, ah?" he suggested, putting an arm around Mischkelovitz's shoulders and steering her towards the shuttlebay doors.

"Music!" she wailed as he led her away. "Music!"

"What was that about?" asked Tyler. Lorca only shook his head. It was never entirely clear what Mischkelovitz was doing or thinking, but that was part of what made her so interesting to have around. She might one day walk into the ready room and request a sexual encounter, and the next burst into the shuttlebay shouting and crying about music as if she were imparting some sort of grand revelation.

Lorca stared at the shuttlebay doors and turned his head slightly towards Lalana. "Which one do you suppose he thinks is the boyfriend?"

"Do you know, I have no idea!" said Lalana, and clicked her tongue. "Wouldn't it be funny if it was Macarius?"

Lorca snorted. "Bet you anything it's Groves." He chuckled.

Tyler stared at them both. Whatever the in-joke was, he was somehow relieved to not be a part of it.

"I feel so sorry for her," said Tilly.

"Do you know, that is why she hates you," said Lalana.

Lorca smiled faintly. That wasn't it at all. He had figured out the truth of the matter a few months back. It was simple, really. Mischkelovitz was the sort of woman who did not like other women. Lalana escaped this hatred because, as much as she called herself female, in reality she was anything but and her nonhumanoid status made her no threat to Mischkelovitz's subconscious fears.

It was Mischkelovitz's loss, really. Half the humans in the universe were women and they were some of the most amazing people. Michael Burnham was one such person, and so, surprisingly enough, was Sylvia Tilly.

* * *

Lorca left Saru in charge of returning them back to their point of origin and accompanied Lalana through emptied corridors back to Lab 26. Apparently Larsson thought O'Malley was the boyfriend because Groves was in the lab and there was no sign of Mischkelovitz. Worryingly, there was also no guard outside the door. Just because Lalana had been gone did not give O'Malley and Allan leave to abandon guarding the lab entirely. The lab still contained valuable research. For the moment, Lorca let it slide.

Lalana cheerfully informed Groves she had a message for him. " _Aik'loq mak'tli'telonn, ja mah kroh se basiil_."

Groves stared. "Seriously?"

"What is the message? Did I say it correctly?"

"Spelta krrann de matoht!" exclaimed Groves, rolling the R harshly. "Je patrossi..."

That, Lorca decided, was enough of that. "Specialist Groves, make yourself scarce. That's an order."

"Where am I being ordered to go?" The way he said the word "ordered" made it sound like an insult.

Lorca shrugged. "Anywhere that's not here."

"For how long?"

"How about forever," said Lorca, in trademark _is-this-a-joke-or-not, decide-at-your-own-peril_ tone of voice.

Groves stared. "I don't... what?"

"Rove, get out," said Lorca impatiently. "Or you can go play brig chess from the actual brig."

"I'm allowed to be—" Groves looked at Lorca's face and decided being allowed to be somewhere wasn't the same as being welcome. He exited.

The burst of heat from Lalana's quarters was mitigated slightly when Lalana adjusted the environment controls to lower the temperature to something more mildly warm. "Of course," she said, "you realize this now means you have no excuse to leave."

"Oh, is that why you keep it so hot in here?" drawled Lorca. Lalana clicked her tongue.

There were still two cookies left from their excursion. His was, "An admirer is concealing his affection for you."

Hers: "Tomorrow will be lucky and memorable for you."

"Trade," said Lorca, since clearly it made no sense for him to have a male admirer. They did.

"This is not accurate," said Lalana of her new fortune. "Your affection is not concealed. You have no secrets from me. Your every truth is written on your face, and if not that, then it will be entirely audible soon enough. Do you know, there are no alarm monitors for respiratory, heartrate, or vocal distress in here."

Lorca raised an eyebrow. "You make it sound like you're planning to kill me."

"Well, they do call it the little death! But I assure you, there will be no doubt as to the fact you are very much alive."

* * *

On the heels of the Mudd report they received good news at last. The best news imaginable, really. Lorca found it worthy of a ship-wide announcement. "Attention, Discovery. As of 0800 hours this morning, we have been given the go-ahead to fight this war as we see fit. The gloves are off. All hands, prepare for battle stations. Black alert!"

Discovery's outer saucer began to rotate, dispersing spores throughout the ship in preparation for the jump. Around him, the bridge crew looked confident and alert. Weeks of drills had been leading up to this moment. All that time spent tracking battles and Klingon sightings, constantly adjusting the target choice as the circumstances of the war changed, and now the go ahead to launch their first real strike since Cornwell.

Lorca had Richter open the comm to the engineering lab. "Mr. Stamets. You ready for this? One jump in, one jump out. Easy a pie."

"One order of key lime, coming right up."

Lorca smiled. Mushroom-modified Stamets was just the latest in a long line of entirely lovely monsters here on Discovery.

The coordinates were set. All weapons were primed. Dress rehearsal was over and it was time for the real show to start. Lorca took up his position near the viewscreen in preparation for the coming strike.

"Go."

The Klingons at Xarantine never knew what hit them. Discovery had been unleashed.


	69. The Order of Things

A/N: This chapter includes the beginning of episode 8, "Si Vis Pacem, Para Bellum." Also, if you were wondering what precisely was in Mischkelovitz's ears, it was the Dublin Guitar Quartet version of Mishima, the entirety of which is available on Youtube.

* * *

Discovery racked up kills. A cruiser here, a wing of raiders there, everywhere dead Klingons, and each time a little bit more hope for the long run. Thousands of lives saved and millions more protected by the successful defense of the front lines. If the Klingons could not advance, those Federation member worlds and colonies nearest the border were that much better off, and Discovery was making its mark in that regard.

Not that every attempt to thwart the Klingons was successful. There were plenty of close calls, missteps, and failures. A Klingon Bird of Prey spotted near the Relva VII frontier outpost turned out to have a cloaked friend. Two crewman died when a plasma conduit exploded after a direct hit on Discovery. At Starbase 35, they could not prevent a crippling strike that rendered the station an enormous hunk of space junk, though they did defend a large number of escape pods until reinforcements could arrive to collect the station refugees. A medical supply freighter exploded before they could reach it, even with the spore drive.

On the whole they were picking up more victories than losses. They were also potentially overdoing it. No sooner had they finished an attack, Lorca was planning the next one, not to mention the unscheduled distress calls. Black and red alerts were sometimes two, even three times a day.

Despite this flurry of action, Discovery did not always come when called. Lorca had no intention of charging into a fight he had no chance of winning. A distress signal arrived from the USS Penfield and Lorca took one look at the tactical readout and canceled the black alert. "If we can't make a difference, there's no point in going," he said to Saru behind closed doors.

Saru's distress was self-evident. The Penfield had been the ship that greeted Discovery when it emerged from null time. They knew Captain Blanchard personally. There were one hundred and ten souls aboard that ship. "Surely some small difference..."

Lorca understood the objection. The desire to sacrifice yourself for the greater good was a hallmark of Starfleet. Too many ships had gone down in pursuit of this ideal over the course of the war which was why, without the successes of Discovery, they would lose the war slowly but surely.

"You can't focus on the battle right in front of you, Saru. You have to consider the entirety of the war. If we lose Discovery, the picture gets a hell of a lot bleaker for everyone. It isn't that I'm trying to save the people on this ship, it's that so long as I do, then I can guarantee we save more people down the line."

That answer, at least, seemed to satisfy the Kelpien, but Saru was not the only one with concerns.

"Captain Lorca," said Admiral Terral tersely as Lorca reported on their latest altercation in the Krios system, which lay in Klingon territory, "we need you to coordinate your efforts and communicate with the fleet."

"Really?" said Lorca, leaning against his desk in a casual display of disrespect. He had come to realize Terral hated him and the fact brought him immense satisfaction because Vulcans were supposed to be above such petty emotions. He really did have an effect on people. "Seems to me Discovery's doing just fine under my direction. I don't know if you've checked your tactical map lately, but we actually gained some territory back this week."

Terral looked like he was about to lose it. His face seemed outwardly calm, but Lorca sensed there was a roiling cloud of anger hidden just behind that forced expression.

Lorca glanced at the comm controls on his desk and moved his hand towards them so it looked for a moment like he was going to hang up on Terral again. Instead, he stood there, brazenly nonchalant, making it clear that while Terral had the rank, Lorca had all the power. "If there's nothing else, admiral, I have a war to fight, and every minute I'm here chatting with you is a minute we're not out there making a difference."

He really had a gift for framing his insubordination with the loftiest and most noble of intentions. He let Terral lecture him briefly about the importance of a coordinated defense, paid him a tiny bit of flagrantly obvious lip service, and finally Terral declared the conversation over and Lorca was free to return to what he had been doing before the call started: reviewing the files Tilly had stolen for him from Memory Alpha.

These files were not a primary concern of Lorca's—he was hardly going to choose some minor personnel mystery over the need he felt to make a substantive difference in the war—but in those scant moments when he found himself with time to kill or when he simply wanted a bit of a diversion from everything else, as he did right now, they offered an escape. Bit by bit, he was piecing together the story, but even with everything Tilly had brought him, he was still missing so much. There were gaps in those files, even in the copies in Memory Alpha.

Another, more recently emerging story involved Mischkelovitz's shuttle bay insights on the subject of music. As much as these insights were the ramblings of a madwoman, they also turned out to be something else.

Mischkelovitz had come up with a viable method of breaking the Klingon cloak.

"Patterns," she explained from the sterile comfort of sickbay, where she had ended up after her outburst of manic inspiration, Dr. Culber standing her side. Culber had managed to calm her without resorting to any Vetroxican. (Not that this freakout was on the same level as the one about Burnham. That had been another beast entirely.) "They aren't just repetitive, they can be broken. You know how stars emit music?"

"Yeah," said Lorca, because there was very little esoteric information about stars he had not consumed as a child.

"Planets do, too. Mostly just useless noise, but there's one planet that sings. Really sings. It's got a large, aturally-noccurring crystal formation that vibrates and resonates at a redictably permeating frequency. Um..." She did not fall apart. She took a slow breath, carefully refocused, and tried again. Her words rose into a shout of triumph as she succeeded in working out what she meant to say all on her own. "Redictably. Predictably. Predictably! Repeating! Frequency!"

Lorca beamed with pride. He felt he deserved a lot of the credit for that little victory. If nothing else, he had contributed to the improvement of Mischkelovitz in a very meaningful way.

"The problem I've been having is that my cloak frequency emitters don't sync up well over range and they don't have enough power individually to cover meaningful regions of space. It's as if there's a bunch of instruments in an orchestra and everyone is either so far away they can't hear each other and the music doesn't come together, or so close that they're hitting each other with their elbows and throwing one another off. But the music being emitted by this naturally-occurring transmitter not only permeates across a broad region of space, it doesn't conflict with itself the way my orchestra does!"

Culber listened attentively. He loved music, too, and there was something magical about the idea of music informing a solution to piercing a Klingon cloak.

"Like the variations of _Mishima_ , all we need to do is modify the frequency of the crystalline emitter into the frequency that resonates with the Klingon cloak, and then it's just a matter of looking to see where the pattern breaks. Like laves wapping—no, no... lave... _waves_ lapping against an invisible object on the beach!" Mischkelovitz looked at Culber and Lorca for approval.

"That's amazing," said Culber. Beauty overcoming hatred and warfare. That was the sort of solution he could get behind.

Lorca concurred. "I think you deserve a cookie for this. Hell, you can have the whole damn bowl." He had not brought any cookies with him, but he was prepared to go fetch one on the spot.

"Forget the cookie. I'd like to have sex again."

For a moment, both Culber and Lorca stood stock still in disbelief. Then Culber's mouth fell open in shock and Lorca's shoulders began to shake with silent but entirely uncontrollable laughter. It took every ounce of willpower he had to keep the laughter from erupting into a sonic volcano.

Culber recovered enough to speak first. "I thought you said that would compromise your work?"

Entirely unruffled, Mischkelovitz said brightly, "Actually, it was talking to you that gave me the idea in the first place!"

Lorca finally managed to resume regular respiratory function. "Dr. Culber. Is she clear to leave sickbay?"

Mischkelovitz stared at Culber expectantly. She knew there was no medical reason for her to remain at this point, but also that Culber could order a few extra tests or an observation period if he truly wanted. Orders she was prepared to disregard completely.

Culber shook his head slightly, still trying to process the fact his attempt to warn her off sleeping with the captain had inadvertently caused Mischkelovitz to do exactly that. "You're free to go, Dr. Mischkelovitz."

"Come on," said Lorca. "This time, you're gonna learn a few things _I_ like. Consider it repaying me the favor." His smirk was entirely too smug.

Mischkelovitz hopped down from the exam table. "Thank you, Dr. Culber! You can call me Mischka." She followed Lorca out of sickbay like a living extension of his shadow. (Culber decided to let the whole thing go, not just for his own sake, but also because he was pretty sure the captain had been so brazen at the end there largely for the purposes of eliciting a reaction and the smart thing was not to fall for the provocation.)

The only problem with Mischkelovitz's brilliant solution was that the finer details of crystalline structures fell well outside her expertise. They had to transmit the details of her proposal to Starfleet's science division for someone else to figure out the implementation and the scientist who ended up with the proposal took complete credit for the idea. When Lorca asked Mischkelovitz if losing control of her project upset her, her response was a surprisingly reasonable, "Science isn't about glory. I know what I did. I don't need any credit." She really was the polar opposite of Stamets.

Besides, she had already moved on to her next project. What that was, she would not say exactly, but when Lorca walked through the lab a few days later he found significant portions of the walls torn open and cables and components everywhere. It was a debris field to rival the Binary Stars.

* * *

For all that Mischkelovitz was now on amicable terms with Culber, this camaraderie did not extent to Stamets. Lorca was on the bridge going over the details of an upcoming battle plan in preparation for a pending tactical simulation when a comm came from the engineering lab.

"Captain! Please tell Dr. Mischkelovitz here to—"

"Captain! He won't give me any spores! I need spores!"

"Absolutely not unless you tell me why you need them!"

"No! That's none of your business! Give me spores!"

"You can't have any!"

Fully cognizant this rampant display of insubordination currently had too large an audience on the bridge, Lorca jumped up from the captain's chair and shouted, "Stamets! Mischkelovitz! My ready room, _now!_ " Then he stormed into the ready room himself, fuming, and waited for them to turn up.

Neither the walk to the turbolift nor the turbolift ride itself inspired in Stamets or Mischkelovitz any sort of meaningful survival instinct. If anything, by the time they arrived, they were even more set against one another than before.

Lorca was at the window with his back turned to the door. Though the wait had done nothing to diminish his disdain for their collective outburst, the view of the stars had instilled in him a sense of calm determination.

"Captain, please tell this crazy woman she can't have any mycelium spores," were the first words out of Stamets' mouth.

Mischkelovitz, who was not known for her impulse control, heard this word and went, "Crazy? Better crazy than _stupid_ you shortsighted, monodisciplinary, mushroom-eating _monkey!_ You couldn't see the forest for the trees if your brain depended on it! The things you know about your own mushrooms are a single page in a children's book compared to the sheer immensity of what I—"

"Enough!" bellowed Lorca, because as amusingly creative as Mischkelovitz's takedowns could be, it would be entirely unfortunate if she suddenly blurted out the existence of the mycelial map in an attempt to one-up Stamets. He turned from the window and looked at them both with the grim fury of someone who had absolutely no patience for any of this. "What the hell is wrong with you both! Do I look like a nanny? You are Starfleet officers! You do _not_ call up to my bridge to settle a _petty squabble!_ "

This dressing down was sufficient to put the fear of God into both Stamets and Mischkelovitz. Mischkelovitz's eyes went wide and her jaw trembled. Stamets turned white as a sheet.

"Stamets, go wait outside." Lorca swallowed as much of his anger as he could and asked Mischkelovitz simply, "What do you need the spores for? Something with the map?"

Thankfully she did not fall into silence. "I can't tell you," she said. "I can't. I just, I can't. Please may I have some spores."

Lorca sighed. Stamets had a point. "Not unless you tell me what for."

Her eyes filled with fear. "I'm sorry, I can't! I can't."

"Why not?"

"I can't tell you that, either!"

"Melly," he began, hoping to offer some form of consolation that would engender her trust and get her to understand that her research on this ship was predicated upon her ability to keep him informed of what she was doing.

He only got so far as those two syllables. Her reaction to the nickname was resoundingly negative. "No!" she went, eyes darkening. "You don't call me that! Only people I love call me that!"

He had not been under the illusion theirs was some great love story, but he had thought her affection for him to be both genuine and deep and for her to indicate otherwise was an unexpected cut. His face fell into an expression of infinite disappointment at this revelation.

She could see his disappointment, of course, because he was terrible at hiding his emotions. She looked at him apologetically. Even if she did not love Lorca, she liked him a lot and felt bad for causing the dismay she saw on his face, so much so her eyes started to water. "I'd like to go now, please," she said. "May I be dismissed?"

He dismissed her. She passed Stamets as she left, not making eye contact, but Stamets could see the tears glinting on her face well enough as she went by.

"Inside, lieutenant," prompted Lorca.

Stamets was relieved that the shouting portion of this encounter seemed to be over, but he was also a good enough person to be worried about the well-being of someone he knew even only as fleetingly as Mischkelovitz. "Is she... okay?"

"No," said Lorca, "but there's nothing either of us can do about that."

Stamets looked at Lorca. Was that regret? Concern? Loneliness...? It was quickly replaced by resignation, but for a moment, it had been there. He hoped the captain's somber state would make him more receptive to the crux of the issue with Mischkelovitz. "Captain, she came into the lab and tried to take an _entire canister_ of mycelium spores. What was I supposed to do? It was call you or security."

Lorca closed his eyes and sighed. When he opened them, he looked at Stamets with a weariness that went beyond the circumstances of this altercation. "Look, Stamets, I'm aware Mischkelovitz is..." Lorca thought back to how O'Malley had once described her. "Herself, but... What's the worst she can do with some spores?"

"Captain. You're not seriously considering giving her my spores, are you?" Stamets squinted incredulously.

"I'm asking you what the worst she can do is."

Stamets considered that. "Maybe short out all the ship's systems? Mess with a jump? Engineer some sort of biological agent? It really depends what she's trying to do."

Lorca nodded to himself. "All right. Let me know if she tries anything again. And lieutenant?"

"Yes, captain?"

"Next time you get in a fight with Mischkelovitz, call Saru." If she did not love Lorca after everything he had done for her, far be it for him to be her savior.

* * *

Cadet Sylvia Tilly observed the altercation between Stamets and Mischkelovitz in the engineering lab with shocked concern. When their argument over the spores spilled onto the bridge audio, Tilly feared for the both of them as they went to face the captain in person. She continued to fret over the argument well after everyone else had returned to their usual duties and long after her shift ended and she returned to the quarters she shared with Burnham.

The way Mischkelovitz had pled with Stamets, desperate and frantic, was impossible for Tilly to ignore. So, too, was the fact Mischkelovitz apparently hated Tilly, because Tilly both pitied and admired Mischkelovitz. Pitied her because she had lost her husband and admired her because finally Tilly understood exactly what Milosz and Emellia Mischkelovitz had been together.

Memory Alpha contained a veritable treasure trove of data. Stewart's codes had given Tilly access to an entire hoard of previously inaccessible files. Not the truly top secret material, but everything just below it, including unpublished papers, notes, and video logs. Since these files fell under the captain's mandate of grabbing "full personnel records for Mischkelovitz and Groves and anything that seems related," Tilly had taken them and quietly copied the relevant scientific data to her personal archives on Discovery before turning over all the files to Lorca.

On paper, Emellia Mischkelovitz had the credentials of a biomedical engineer. The notes, unpublished material, and video logs showed she was readily capable of more and made clear the reason she had been so useful in null time. As Tilly sat in her quarters watching one of the purloined video files, she marveled at the way Emellia and Milosz interacted.

"Our name is Dr. Mischkelovitz," said Milosz in an introduction to a report meant for someone at Starfleet Command. He was diminutive, round-faced, and missing an eye. The hair on his head was the color of copper. "We're here today to talk about interphasic torpedoes."

"Torpedoes which can pass through shields," said Emellia. "By modulating the frequency of a localized emitter..."

"...You can match the phase structure of the shield and slip right through it."

"Theoretically," said Emellia.

Milosz again. "And practically, but we won't tell you how."

"Because the point of this isn't to break through shields with torpedoes."

"The point is to stop it from happening."

"In order to stop it we..."

"...Had to learn how to do it first."

There were hundreds of hours of footage of them finishing each other's sentences. They never referred to each other individually. They occasionally moved and spoke in tandem.

Burnham came in, startling Tilly. Tilly tried to shut off the video with a console command but hit the maximum volume instead.

"The difference between this particle cohesion effect," boomed Milosz's voice.

Emellia's continued, "And the cohesion effect of the previous..."

"Gah! Computer, stop playback! Stop!" said Tilly frantically and the playback ceased. Burnham raised an eyebrow. Tilly looked at her apologetically. "You can't tell anyone you saw that."

"Was that..." Burnham remembered Tilly mentioning her admiration for Milosz Mischkelovitz at lunch some weeks back, even if she did not recall his name. "The theoretical engineer married to Dr. Mischkelovitz?"

Tilly nodded. "The other Mischkelovitz." Now, though, she understood there was no other Mischkelovitz. There never had been.

Burnham and Tilly spoke as they got ready for bed. Tilly briefly outlined the fact she had gotten access to files she was not supposed to, mentioned Mischkelovitz's outburst in the lab, and finished with, "Apparently she hates me. Sometimes I wonder if it's just natural for people to hate me. How am I going to overcome that and become a captain?"

Laying in bed, Burnham smiled. "She doesn't hate you."

"Lal—someone told me she does."

"She doesn't know you," said Burnham. "You can't hate what you don't know. You can only fear it."

Tilly pulled the covers up to her chin and considered this. As usual, Burnham offered excellent advice. It was also clear that being a good captain meant figuring out ways to work with people, even people who hated you, and Tilly intended to be a great captain someday.

To top it all off, after all the rumors and speculation, it turned out Mischkelovitz had been working on breaking the Klingon cloak. A totally harmless, ethical project. Like Michael Burnham, Mischkelovitz was nothing like her horrible reputation.

Captain Lorca had seen something in Burnham and Mischkelovitz. Tilly could now see something in Mischkelovitz, too. Tilly got up from her bed and started to get dressed again. Burnham gave her a questioning look.

"There's something I have to do," Tilly offered in explanation.

* * *

Tilly knew Mischkelovitz would be awake. As she walked down the corridor with the concealed canister in her arms, she really hoped no one else was.

One of the door guards was up, of course. The older one with the freckles. He looked at her curiously. If only it had been Larsson, this would have been so much easier. "Delivery for Dr. Mischkelovitz," she announced.

He had an entirely charming accent. "At this hour?"

"Yep, well, better late than never! And I already have the, you know, security clearances? For the project?"

"I know. You're Cadet Tilly." He smiled at her. She had been cleared to learn about Lalana for the Memory Alpha mission, though she had never seen fit to attempt to apply that clearance to visiting the lab until now. "What is it exactly?"

Tilly paled. "It's... classified."

"All right then. Hang on." He touched a comm button on the door panel. "I've got Cadet Tilly here with a delivery for you."

"It's the thing you asked Lieutenant Stamets for!" Tilly blurted.

"Yes!" was Mischkelovitz's enthusiastic reply.

The door opened after a minute. Mischkelovitz looked at Tilly with enormously hopeful eyes.

"Got it right here!" said Tilly, giving the canister a small shake in her arms.

Mischkelovitz grabbed Tilly's sleeve and pulled her into the door lock, closing the outer door, but did not move to open the inner one. Instead, Mischkelovitz ducked down to the floor and pried open a panel. There was a small darkened crawlspace behind it. Mischkelovitz motioned for Tilly to put the canister down and then rolled it into the darkness.

"Thank you!" said Mischkelovitz, backing into the crawlspace. "Can you bring me more?"

Tilly hesitated. She had not considered Mischkelovitz might require more than one canister of spores. "Um, I'm not sure if I should... Lieutenant Stamets doesn't know I'm here... And I'm actually going to need the canister back..." It was one of the spares, so it would not be missed immediately, but a charade of this magnitude could only last so long.

"Come back tomorrow and I'll give it back. But bring more spores if you can. It's important."

"It isn't dangerous what you're doing, right?" Tilly had already asked herself the same question Lorca had asked Stamets with the crucial difference that Tilly had come up with no discernible harm Mischkelovitz could do. (If she had heard what Stamets told Lorca, she would have pointed out most of his answer entailed potential complications that were not specific to spore-based projects but rather general research risks, and all of them entirely unlikely given Mischkelovitz's familiarity with the spores from the events of null time.)

"Everything is dangerous," said Mischkelovitz. "But if you mean, is it dangerous to Discovery? Absolutely not. I would never harm this ship. It's my home."

"You know," said Tilly, smiling, "you're just like Michael!"

There was a flash of offense in Mischkelovitz's wild eyes. She picked up the panel and squirmed farther backwards into the crawlspace, pulling the panel back into place as she did. While Tilly might have forgiven Burnham for the Battle of the Binary Stars, Mischkelovitz had not.

Security clearance did not equal door control and Tilly was forced to pound on the outer door to get out. "The controls are on the wall over there," the guard told her when the door was open.

Tilly turned around. "Oh! She didn't..."

"No," said the guard, shaking his head. "She doesn't usually."

"Well, good night!" said Tilly, and started to walk off. She stopped and turned back. "I don't actually know your name."

"Colonel O'Malley."

"It's nice to meet you, colonel!" Tilly extended her hand and they shook.

"Likewise. After all, between your hair and my freckles, I reckon we've got ourselves a full Scotsman," said O'Malley with a chuckle.

Tilly giggled. "I guess so!"

As he watched Tilly depart, O'Malley could not help but wonder what Lorca would have made of the joke. Either rolled his eyes or laughed, depending how many drinks in they were. He missed that sense of humor. He closed his eyes and leaned back against the wall. He could see Lorca's face quite clearly in his mind's eye but he could not hear his laugh. He had never had much of an audio memory.

* * *

There was real determination not to have Starbase 46 end up like Starbase 35, so when the Klingons came calling, Discovery turned up for the main event alongside several other Federation vessels. The battle was fierce, nearly a dozen ships in all, but by days' end it was won and this region of space was, at least for the day, a little safer.

They docked at the starbase for a quick resupply and Lalana decided to seize the opportunity to take care of something. "Einar," she said, "Please see to it that crate is sent to Dr. Li."

Larsson did not have to ask what crate because it had been sitting in the quarters he and Groves shared ever since Memory Alpha.

When Lalana had seen the familiar book in Lorca's hand in the Section 31 storage facility at Memory Alpha, she realized right then and there that fate had presented her with the opportunity to correct an injustice. The fabricated note she included with the crate read:

"I am sorry, Samaritan, for taking these from you. I needed them to fulfill the promise I made you. I return them now and I wish your family many generations of enduring success. Please protect the books well. Humans live such short lives, and all that lives after them is their stories. The stories in these books belong to you and your descendants. Again, I am sorry that I took them from you, even if it was for a good reason. Regards, your friend, Lalana."

There was no telling given the war whether or not the crate would reach its destination but Lalana believed it would. She had seen the halo of stars on the book in Lorca's hand. In her experience, that always meant something good.

* * *

The planet with the naturally-occurring crystal transmitter was called Pahvo. It looked lovely from orbit, a blue-white gem much resembling Earth, but Lorca was not going down there. Saru, Burnham, and Tyler were.

It looked to be a simple mission. Beam down, refine the transmitter according to the expert's instructions, and every Klingon ship in the sector would find itself gently lapped by cosmic ocean waves. Study the ripples, find the ships. Win the war.

In the meantime, Lorca searched for the next plausible target among the day's tactical and intelligence reports. The Klingons had really upped their defenses lately. They were pulling back ships from attack missions to try and handle the fact this one Federation ship kept popping into their territory like a ghost and reigning terror on unsuspecting targets. It was a good sign overall, but it meant easy targets were getting scarcer. Everything in today's reports would require corralling some backup from Terral and Lorca was not in the mood.

Finding no great opportunities, Lorca returned to the Memory Alpha files. He had been trawling through the data trove off and on for almost two weeks now. Tilly had picked up entirely too much of Milosz Mischkelovitz's research, which was a little annoying, but she had gotten a lot of other files Lorca would never have thought to.

One such file was a court transcript. The case was called _UFP v. J. Narvic et al_. and it dated from 2237. The file did not stand out to Lorca because on the surface it seemed to have little relevance to Groves and Mischkelovitz. As he opened it, he realized it was perhaps the most important file there was.

Tilly, by some stroke of genius, had not just run a search for Mischkelovitz. She had also run a filter for files containing both "Emellia" and "Milosz." This was important because nowhere in this file were the names Mischkelovitz or Groves ever mentioned.

UFP v. J. Narvic et al. was, when written out in its entirety, United Federation of Planets v. James Narvic, Corinne Narvic, Mirna Al-Marri, Emily Petrellovitz, Meiling Zhou, Anton Nguyen, and Linnea Stewart. Those names were important, but they were not the reason Lorca had this file. It was the names on the witness list: Agnieszka Mieszała, John Narvic, Macarius O'Malley, Milosz Mieszała, and Emellia Petrellovitz, among others.

The transcript was immense. Over fifteen hundred hours long. Most of it, dry legal proceedings. He glanced at the opening statements. According to the prosecution, this was a case about gross abuse of power and using children as subjects of scientific experimentation. "A fundamental betrayal of the responsibilities parents have towards their children." According to the defense, the case was about the rights parents had to determine the medical care and education of their children. "The prosecution will attempt to paint this in the most nefarious light, but every single one of these people you see behind me wanted nothing more than the best for their children."

Lorca skipped ahead to O'Malley's testimony. O'Malley's voice seemed to jump off the page.

"...she just kept hitting herself, over and over. I didn't know what to do." ... "Mum—I mean, Ms. Petrellovitz, she wasn't ever there." ... "I didn't see the tests. I didn't have anything to do with them. I just know that sometimes Emellia would come back and she, she wouldn't, she just looked..."

The prosecutor asked O'Malley what he would have done, if he could have.

"Ended it," was the answer. "By any means necessary."

Then, the cross from the defense. "The fact is, Mr. O'Malley, you never told anyone, did you? Because this wasn't an experiment conducted on children, it was an attempt at treatment of severely disabled—"

"No! That's not true! She's not disabled, she's just different! You don't know anything about her! He did that to her! He did! And her! And her, and her, and him, and—"

The judge ordered O'Malley to restrain himself. The defense attorney resumed. "Mr. O'Malley, you didn't arrive at the facility until 2231. You can't say for certain what events took place prior to 2231."

"No, I can't, can I, John?"

Lorca squinted at that. It was just words on a page but he could hear the way O'Malley always seemed to spit Groves' name jumping out at him. There was no John Groves in the transcript. There was, however, a John Narvic. When he scrolled up to John Narvic's testimony, it was readily apparent it was Groves.

"Whatever," was one of the first words out of John Narvic's mouth. There was a casual nonchalance to it all as he described various tests and procedures. "In a room for three to six hours, just solving problems, as fast as you can. You know, computational arithmetic, trig and calc, that sort of thing. Nothing hard."

"Are you saying you and the other children solved advanced mathematical equations for hours on end beginning at age eight?"

"Advanced? No. Wait, you don't think trig and calc are hard, do you? Wow, you must be dumb." Entirely, unmistakably John Groves.

Milosz and Emellia's testimonies turned out to be less useful. Milosz's read like fractured snippets of poetry, sentences trailing off and then beginning again out of seemingly nowhere. Emellia's testimony seemed to consist almost entirely of non-answers. Lorca had been on the receiving end of that silent treatment before.

The bridge pinged and Lorca was forced to put aside the transcripts while they went to aid a ship with some engine trouble. "Ah, let's go pick up some intelligence of our own, why don't we," Lorca said to Airiam afterwards. "See if we can't rustle up something fun."

They made a good effort, but there really was nothing today. No contact yet from Saru, Burnham, and Tyler, either. That annoyed Lorca. How long did it take to complete those modifications? Had they gotten sidetracked? Should he go pick them up? Then Terral called and asked them to take up a position near Starbase 46 as part of a display of defensive force. Entirely uninspired, Terral's tactics. "Airiam, you have the conn," Lorca said, retreating to the ready room.

There was a message waiting. Comm request from O'Malley. He responded, wondering what variety of request it was.

Personal, it turned out. "Fancy a drink tonight?"

A smile formed on Lorca's face. He had not expected to hear that offer ever again. He actually really did want a drink. "All right. Let's do my place for a change. And how about something a little stronger than beer."

There was a pause. "What exactly do you mean, your place?"

* * *

O'Malley hesitated at the threshold to Lorca's quarters. "Should I be worried?"

"About what? This isn't a come on, colonel." He just wanted to kick back, sit on the couch, and not worry about having to stumble more than three meters to go to sleep.

"Mm," went O'Malley. "Yes, I should rather hope not given how things went the last time you had someone in here for drinks."

In truth, the last visitor to the room had been Mischkelovitz, but she didn't drink anything, and far be it for Lorca to point this out. "That's not funny," said Lorca. The tryst with Cornwell and everything that followed remained a sour point.

"Sorry," said O'Malley. "So what's our poison?"

It was whiskey, of course. "If that's not a problem for your duty shift and all." Beers in moderation were a little more forgivable during working hours and this was O'Malley's working hours.

"Oh, no, I just cashed in all the favors Larsson owed me and told him to stand on shift until his feet fall off. The man owes me an accumulated twenty-three hours." O'Malley really took his accounting of favors seriously. Lorca poured and handed O'Malley a glass as they sat. "What are we toasting, then?"

"To dead Klingons," said Lorca.

"You know if you toast for death, death comes for you," O'Malley said in warning, but clinked his glass all the same.

"They say death comes for us all, but unless he's got a spore drive like ours, I think we'll be fine." Lorca smirked.

O'Malley grinned in response. "Fair enough," he said, and sipped at his drink.

Lorca stretched out one arm across the back of the couch and put his feet up. "You comm'd me, so, what's the occasion? Something on your mind, colonel?"

That made it sound like they were back to ranks. O'Malley raised an eyebrow and squinted at Lorca. "Do you know, I'd rather not say."

Lorca squinted right back. "You wanted to talk and you won't say why?"

"I wanted to drink, captain!" said O'Malley with a laugh. "Talking's optional."

That made Lorca chuckle and shake his head, amused. He was unable to suppress the smile on his face. It did fade somewhat as he recalled why they had not done this in so long. His expression turned hopeful. "So, Mac, we good?"

O'Malley smiled faintly and nodded his head. "As can be. I couldn't stay mad at you forever. Besides, I tried drinking with Larsson and the man's just not very funny. Though, he did have a decent insight about the ship."

"Oh?"

"He said the ship rather looks like a woman with her legs spread."

Lorca snorted. "I've noticed."

"Oh, you did, did you!" exclaimed O'Malley, face lighting up. "Of course you did."

"It's the nacelles," said Lorca. He had spent more time than anyone admiring the design of Discovery. "They're flush with the supports, so they look a single, unbroken line off the body of the ship. And since the neck's so short, saucer feels like part of the body too. Gives you these two long, lovely legs stretching out far as the eye can see."

O'Malley listened to the way Lorca described Discovery and could hear the love in the description. The way Lorca's hands stroked the air as he illustrated the ship's features had an admiring delicacy to it. "You space cowboys and your ships. Pornography, that was. Though, I suspect a gay man would say the ship looks like a man. Eye of the beholder and all that."

"Nah," said Lorca, eyes twinkling with mischief. "Drag queen, maybe."

O'Malley cracked up. "I missed this so much!" he laughed. "And I'm glad there's no one 'round to hear it. Can you imagine a superior reprimanding us for suggesting the ship's got attractive legs?"

Lorca lifted his glass for a new toast. "Here's to being in charge."

"Well, one of us, anyway," said O'Malley, accepting both the toast and another measure of whiskey. "These quarters are tremendous. Must be four times bigger than mine."

"Well you made such a great first impression, I decided to put you in ensign quarters," bragged Lorca.

"Oh, are we spilling secrets now?" said O'Malley, brightening.

Lorca snorted again and shook his head. Even if they finished off this entire bottle, there was no chance of that.

"That's too bad," said O'Malley. "Surely you must be tired of carrying around so many. I know I am. It's exhausting."

A sly smile emerged onto Lorca's face. "You think you've got secrets, Mac?" Lorca clicked his tongue, entirely disagreeing.

"Come now, I may talk a lot, but it's mostly flim-flam. If anything, I've more in common with you when it comes to secrets than most of the people on the ship. Nobody here really knows the first thing about me."

"Wanna bet?" asked Lorca. He took O'Malley's raised eyebrow as a challenge. "You've been pretty up-front criticizing my command. But dishing it out isn't the same as taking it."

O'Malley leaned back. "Well this ought to be interesting. Do your worst."

Lorca sat forward, glass in hand, and fixed O'Malley with a firm gaze to observe and judge his reactions. "You, Mac, are a complete pushover. And that is not an attractive trait in a man." It was not an attractive trait in a woman, either, but this was a targeted assassination. "If you really wanted kids, you'd have 'em. Aeree doesn't want any, right? And you just go along with whatever she says. 'Cause that what you do: what everyone else tells you to."

O'Malley stared unflinchingly at Lorca. Something in his eyes said this rang true, but he was not taken aback by it. "Well, more lucky you that."

"Maybe," said Lorca. Then he looked away and a sneer tugged at his lip. If O'Malley had been less complacent, he could have stopped what happened to Mischkelovitz six years sooner. O'Malley caught this expression and wondered as to its meaning.

"Is that all? That's your worst?"

Lorca tilted his head and frowned in wry disapproval. "You really want to open another can of worms? After we just patched things up."

"I have a feeling the can's already open and you're just hiding it behind your back. Come on, Gabriel, what is it. If I haven't deserted you yet, chances are I won't now. Besides, friendships are built on honesty. If you can't be honest with your friends, what's the point of having them."

"You don't want me to be honest," warned Lorca.

"I want that more than anything."

For a long moment, Lorca said nothing, pursing his lips and trying to decide if O'Malley knew what he was asking. "I don't think you actually do want kids, Mac. Deep down, you think you'd fail them the way you failed your sister. Because it wasn't you who saved her from that research colony, was it? It was John Groves."


	70. Seek and You Shall Find

A/N: The following story takes place during the events of episode 8, "Si Vis Pacem, Para Bellum," but also almost entirely before. This is actually our last domino. It's almost time to trigger the final sequence. Everything has been in service of a grand design.

Also, I was planning to write up an abridged version of this, but decided to post the full version because it was done and it would take another evening to rewrite. If anyone out there just finds this abominable, let me know and I'll get right on posting a version that's hopefully more palatable! (Honestly, it's no trouble, I was about to do it anyway, I just need sleep and didn't want to make anyone wait on me to finish that version in order to read this one.)

* * *

Lorca and O'Malley sat in Lorca's quarters, the stars gleaming through the window beside them, two glasses of whiskey and a bottle between them. There was a weight in the air, as if the scales were teetering on the verge of imbalance and there was no telling what side they would come down on.

O'Malley looked like he had seen a ghost, or perhaps become one. There was no color in his face. He set his glass down unfinished, folded his hands, and looked down and away.

Lorca set his glass down as well. "I'd take it back if I could," he offered, and even slightly meant it.

"No, I asked for honesty," said O'Malley, looking back at Lorca with an unflinching gaze, "and that was very honest. Thank you."

Lorca could barely believe his ears. He had just summoned up what had to be one of O'Malley's greatest shames in life and O'Malley was thanking him. "You're fine with that?"

"I have to live with what I did, or rather, didn't do." Then something even stranger happened. O'Malley started to smile. "Do you want to hear a story? You seem to have some part of it already, but how about you hear it from someone who lived it?"

There was no disguising Lorca's interest. O'Malley shook his head, amused. "I'll tell you under two conditions. First, that after I've told you everything, you never ask anyone about it ever again. And you don't look into it further. Got it?"

Assuming O'Malley really did tell all, that was acceptable. Lorca nodded. "All right."

O'Malley suddenly sat forward, fixed Lorca with an expression of intense seriousness, and said, "Second, John and Emellia must never know that I told you. Ever. And if you so much as breathe any part of this to them, so help me god, nothing in this universe will save you from what I'll do to you. Do I make myself clear, captain?"

Lorca's eyebrows shot up. "Is that a threat?"

"Yes. And a promise."

"It's not wise to make promises you can't keep." Straight out of a cookie, that nugget.

"Likewise," said O'Malley, and meant it. "Do you want to know or not?"

Lorca thought a moment. It was clear the family dynamic at play went above and beyond. It seemed equally unwise to get in the middle of that. "I promise."

"Very well," said O'Malley. "I hope you had nothing else planned for the evening."

"Short of a Klingon attack, you have my full and undivided attention."

O'Malley began. "I first met my sister when I was sixteen years old. She was eight. It was nine years since I'd seen my mother last. After my parents split up, I stayed with my father on Earth. He wasn't an easy man to live with." That was something Lorca could well understand. "So when mother said, finally, that I could go and live with her, I jumped at the opportunity. You couldn't have kept me on Earth if you tried."

* * *

I had always thought my father was to blame for my mother's leaving, that he'd made her life as impossible, empty, and miserable as he had mine, but I came to find out this was not the case. The reason my mother left had nothing to do with my father and everything to do with a man named Dr. James Narvic. The leader of the QORYA project: "Qualitative Operational Research into Youth Advancement."

Narvic was a developmental psychiatrist with an interest in what he called "native human potential." In essence, the chance any human might develop genius-level intellect with the proper intervention, up to but not including genetic augmentation, owing to what had happened the last time people like Narvic meddled in gene therapies.

Instead, Narvic's chosen protocol focused on developmental neurochemistry. The label of neurochemistry, you see, skirts around that pesky little law banning genetic augmentation. We're not changing their genes, we're just changing how their brains function! And if they end up with a few birth defects from the chemicals we used, oh well, we'll deal with those later, the important thing is their minds are brilliant.

To be specific, Narvic was after sustained induced neuroplasticity. Retaining the adaptive capacity of early childhood development into the stages of advanced learning. It's a little scary how well I can still remember the literature twenty years later.

Now, my mother was a very clever woman, captain, too clever for the life she had on Earth, saddled with me and my father. Neither one of us is what you would call a great intellect. My mother wanted a child who would share her intelligence or even surpass it, someone who could live the life she felt she ought to have had.

So she followed Narvic to his "research colony," leaving me behind. She really didn't want to end up with another idiot like me, and at seven years of age, I was too old for Narvic's experimental protocol. Apparently, if you're going to try to chemically induce genius, you ought to start early, preferably in utero, or at least with a baby.

That's right, I said babies. That's why most of Narvic's staff were women. So that the researchers in the project were the parents of the children in question and freely able to consent to this experimentation. The legality of this eventually came into question, but at least from their early perspective, it was unassailable.

(Here O'Malley paused, looked away, and breathed slowly through his nose to calm himself. While this was a luxury they perhaps did not have time for, Lorca did not object. After a moment, O'Malley continued.)

Emellia was already "problematic" by the time I arrived. They considered her defective. The only reason my mother called me was that she wanted to spend less time with Melly and thought I might be an appropriate _playmate_ to free her up to do just that. Playmates, a sixteen-year-old and an eight-year-old. My mother may have been very clever, but she was entirely unsuited to the task of rearing children.

Would you care to know what Emellia was doing the very moment I met her? She was hitting herself in the face. I think you've seen her do this, actually, but not like it was then. She'd had a test that morning and didn't exceed her previous results to the extent they wanted, so she was punishing herself for what she perceived as a failure to perform.

She was eight years old. Eight. And they'd taught her that if she didn't perform up to snuff, she was utterly worthless, so she sat there, hitting herself, and my damnedable mother said to me, "Macarius, this is your sister, Emellia, why don't you two play in here while I go work." And then she left me with her.

I was terrified. I didn't know what to do. It was a nightmare. Even as an adult, it's hard to be prepared for something like that. Taking it on as a child...

(Here he took a deep breath.)

The first words Melly ever said to me were, "I'm sorry I'm not good enough." And I knew right then and there. For all we may seem like different people, Gabriel, my sister and I are more alike than anything. Both of us, thanks to our mother, have never once felt sufficient to the task at hand. That's why we work so hard at everything. And my sister... My sister is entirely wonderful. I mean, she's awful, she's terrified of most everything, she still beats herself up, though much less nowadays, and she doesn't eat or sleep or think or act right, but when I look at her, I see this light. It makes me think even in the darkest of situations, there's still hope, because somehow, despite everything they did to her, that light has never gone away. And they did a lot to her. It was six more years before the experiment ended.

It took me a full year before I even understood what was going on, really. The place was a madhouse. The children had developed their own language so they could communicate without the adults understanding and they were constantly climbing into the walls because the walls was the one place you could go escape from the adults and tests and chemicals. The one thing the children liked was the learning because that was the one thing they had control over—they got to pick their own subjects.

Honestly, I made a terrible mistake leaving Earth, but I was too proud to give my father the satisfaction of knowing he was right, so I stayed on, looking after Melly.

There were twelve children in total. John was the eldest, one of two batch zero children who underwent the protocol after they were born. Milosz and Emellia were both from batch A, along with another girl called Faiza. Then there were three in batch B and four in batch C.

Milosz was far and away the star pupil. But it's worth noting that no one in batch A was what you would call well-adjusted.

If you haven't, I recommend looking up some of Milosz's video logs from his projects. Starfleet has hundreds of the things. You'll see what I mean. He was brilliant. I've never met anyone his equal. He sopped up information like a sponge, made connections faster even than the computer sometimes, and everything he tried, he seemed to excel at. Intellectually. Physically, you could blow him over with a feather, and socially, well, that's why you ought to look up some of the video logs.

He and Emellia were inseparable. From the moment they were born, they spent almost every moment together. I know I say Melly is like an extension of myself, but they were like one person in two places. They could finish each other's sentences and they compensated perfectly for each other's deficits.

It's interesting. I never thought Milosz and I got along, but one day we happened to be alone in a room and he said, out of nowhere, exactly as Melly does, "I love you." And I went, "Really? I've always thought you hated my guts." And he said, "Why would you think that? We tell you we love you all the time." Because to Milosz, something Emellia said was the same as something he had said himself. That's why they called each other by the same name. In their minds, at least, they were the same person. Even back then, when they were eight.

Yes, captain, this is relevant, because here's the rub. They tested the children individually to chart their progress. Milosz, being the "head" of the pair, always performed very well. Emellia, being the "heart," freaked out when she was separated from Milosz and it affected her performance. Every. Single. Time.

But the "adults" didn't see it that way. They thought Emellia only _seemed_ to perform well with Milosz because she was using him as a crutch, and that he was covering for her inadequacies when they were together using their invented language to share answers.

Meanwhile, Milosz couldn't understand why they always thought Emellia was worse than him, because to him, their test results were exactly the same, because they were the same person. The logic of children, Gabriel.

By the way, you know how John makes it seem like he doesn't care about anything? That's a façade he developed because he's lazy. He pretended not to be as smart as the others so they'd pay him less attention, give him easier tests.

And it worked, for him and only him. Everyone else they expected great things from. Largely because of Milosz. How ironic the best results they got from their protocols were from the son of the cleaning lady. Yes, that's right! Milosz's mother was the lab assistant. She cleaned the surfaces. She was a C-student studying chemistry at a third-rate university who loved science something fierce, but didn't really have any particular aptitude for it, and she wasn't terribly smart. That was how Narvic got her. She was a starry-eyed ingenue who admired what the "real" scientists around her were doing.

I suppose the thing that kept them all going was the fact that they got results. They created a pile of geniuses. Crazy, nonfunctional geniuses, but there was no denying the kids were smart. The real question is how much of that was the chemicals and how much the rigorous educational methods they employed. Any child can seem a genius if they're given the sort of narrow intensity of focus into science these children were. So after all that, jury's still out. All I can say is, they're smart, but I wouldn't want to be them. Their brains are broken.

It wasn't all bad. Despite evidence to the contrary, the parents did mostly love their kids, our mother being the glaring exception. Mum never gives an inch unless she feels you've earned it, and Melly and I never earned it.

Sometimes they'd send me into the walls to try and fish hiding children out. The transporter at the facility could only beam one person at a time, and without any way to tell which child was which, it was transporter roulette when you wanted one... They tried tagging them, but the kids cut the tags out. That was Melly's job, actually. The blood in those walls... You want terror? Crawl into a QORYA wall space. (O'Malley shuddered. Lorca suspected he was not a born claustrophobic.)

Actually, that's the origin of John's favorite joke. Y'see, the children did share one bit of genetic manipulation. "Controlling the variables" Narvic called it. You say research colony, I say research cult. When John was thirteen or so, my mother became concerned because he was close with Melly and they couldn't monitor the spaces inside the walls. They decided they ought to be sure the children got the talk. Not the version of the talk you or I had—at least, I hope not—the most prohibitive version of the talk imaginable because they absolutely were not going to have _that_ happen.

John, by the way, thought the implication he was involved with Melly to be _utterly hysterical_. So much so, he's persisted in recreating that joke as many times and in as many ways as he can over the years. The way their brains are wired, every time one of the QORYA subjects hears a joke, it's like they're hearing it for the first time. They practically die of laughter.

You said I failed my sister. Fair enough, I did. Six years we stayed in that prison. But as much as it was a prison, it was all she knew, and it isn't an easy thing to turn against your own parents. Even one like mum. I mean, I'm not gonna say I love my mother, but I don't hate her. To be honest, I didn't even hate John Narvic. Which makes what happened all the harder.

Six years after I arrived, Faiza died. She was the most physically unfortunate one because she had the highest dose of Narvic's precious in utero genius juice, and at age fourteen, she just... she gave up. Deteriorated in front of our eyes. Collapsed into herself. John liked Faiza a lot, and he'd read enough law to decide someone ought to be held accountable for her death. And though I didn't know where to begin when reporting something like this, John did, because legalities were his interest. He knew exactly the right person to contact and he hacked the communication system and he did just that.

So, yes, he was the one that exposed the project to the relevant authorities. But I don't think he thought it through. They didn't just try to find someone culpable for Faiza's death, they went after all of our parents for gross medical malfeasance.

In the space of two days, the entire facility was dismantled. Everyone taken into custody, me included. I was lucky. The woman in charge of the operation, after I told her my part in it all, helped me. I mean, they could have charged me as some sort of accomplice, I was old enough. I don't think the charges would have resulted in a conviction, but they could have charged me all the same. That's why I've always made it my mission... When someone tells me what happened, truly and honestly, I always try to help. Because that woman helped me. She taught me that.

Anyway, the children all ended up in a foster facility, which of course was a disaster, because those kids were difficult even for the people who knew how to handle them. Except John turned eighteen after a month and just checked himself out.

I was in custody for... a week and a half and then they let me go. They decided they didn't have a strong case against Milosz's mum because she wasn't a full participant in the research, so they gave her immunity in return for testimony and released her as well a week later. But they wouldn't give either of us custody of Milosz or Melly until we proved we were fit, which was a sight harder for me because I had no resources whatsoever. Thankfully, Milosz's mum had lovely relatives and they took me in and set us both up well enough that after a couple months a judge allowed Milosz, Emellia, and Milosz's little sister Marianna to come with us and I got to be my sister's guardian. Which I had been basically doing already, so. This was just legal recognition of that.

We couldn't get the other children, though. They were stuck in that foster facility. Even once they released all the adults from custody, they wouldn't release the children to their parents. They allowed only monitored, timed visits. I mean, we're talking a sort of medical child abuse case, so the kids were never going to be reunited with their parents unless the charges were dropped or the parents found innocent.

And, by the way, if you think the children didn't get into the walls of the foster facility... they did. It is the one thing you can count on QORYA subjects to do. They're like rats. They'll claw and chew their way into spaces they feel safe. Literally. I've seen Melly eat wallpaper.

Anyway, the kids were at the foster facility, the parents were released on their own recognizance but facing serious criminal charges, and after a few months, the trial got underway. Now, John had an interest in the law and tried to worm his way onto the prosecution, which of course, no one was going to let him do. They humored him for a bit, but they found him annoying if you can believe that. (That was the most believable part of the story where Lorca was concerned.) Plus, he was staying with his mother, who was one of the defendants.

John decided this whole thing was much less fun than he had thought it was going to be, so he did something so... I don't know if I have a word to describe it. He... he deleted all the files from the project. From evidence. From the prosecution's evidence. Every single copy.

So, you might know this, but John's one of the most brilliant systems hackers you'll ever meet. There are plenty who are better, but he's top tier. He programmed a chess game while locked in your brig, and as he's fond of pointing out, he could have walked out of the brig any time he wanted, he just chose not to. So he got away with this evidence tampering. They could never prove it was him, he's that good. But I knew, because nobody else would've done it.

I think he decided he wanted to put an end to the court case partly because he realized everyone was suffering so damn much, but largely because they wouldn't let him participate meaningfully in the prosecution.

But just because the files were gone didn't put an end to the case. They continued it. Months it went on. It became our life.

(O'Malley suddenly went quiet and looked down. "We can stop," offered Lorca. It had been nearly fifteen minutes now. "I'd rather just get it over with, we're almost done," said O'Malley, and resumed.)

Six months in, even with the files missing, it was pretty obvious they were going to get the conviction based on testimony alone. And one day, Dr. Narvic didn't turn up in court. They sent someone 'round to see why. He was dead. He'd... he'd slit his wrists. I realize the man was the cause of a lot of suffering, but... I didn't want that. Nobody did.

They still felt they had enough to continue the trial against the others, so after a week, it resumed. And John was there the first day back, but not the second. I looked at the spot he usually sat and just thought, something's not right. And I went and found him and got him to hospital. Turns out, John's dad asked him to take care of the others before he did what he did. Made him promise. Big burden on someone that young. And because he'd been apart from the others for almost a year at that point and everyone blamed him, no one was talking to him. So that's how I ended up looking after John. And maybe he's smarter than I am, but damned if I didn't have to tell him how to make it up to everyone.

And he did. Got the batch B kids emancipated, legally changed his and his mother's names back to her maiden name, wrote a bunch of papers on bioethics.

Oh, and as for the trial, they were convicted. Sentenced twenty years, served five to twelve. Where any of them are, I couldn't tell you. I joined Starfleet and never looked back. Which isn't to say I escaped. After you live something like that, it never really leaves you. That's why I ended up in Investigative Services. Melly and Milosz joined not long after, and John set it up so as they would never be separated. Fate, of course, had a different plan.

So there you have it. You now know the entire story of the QORYA project and everything that came of it.

* * *

At last, O'Malley picked up his glass again and polished off its contents.

It was a seemingly complete story, save for one glaring omission Lorca could see. "Then, your sister and Milosz?"

"Oh, nothing does get past you. Another manifestation of John's damn joke. And if you're asking what it is I think you're asking, even if they could have, they wouldn't. Not only did every child have it drummed into their heads that sex was the absolutely worst thing you could do, Milosz was almost as messed up physically as Faiza, and she died. What kept Milosz alive was Melly building parts for him. Kidneys, a lung. Frankly, he was lucky he had all ten fingers. Turns out that wasn't a guarantee on the Narvic protocol."

That was clearly a reference to Danica Stewart, which brought Lorca to a second question. "And the language no one can translate?"

"You want to know why it can't be translated?"

"Genetics?" It was half a question, half a statement based on Stewart's insights at Memory Alpha.

"Genetics? Well, that's one way of putting it. It can't be translated because it depends on patterns. It doesn't have a vocabulary and syntax the way most languages do. It seems to, but one word means one thing one day, and another thing the next. It can even change depending on the hour. That's what the Qorya children are so good at. Pattern recognition. They encoded their language so it shifts, and since only they know the algorithm, only they can follow it from one day to the next."

It slotted into place. Lorca realized why Mischkelovitz had the ability to do what she did. Everything, it turned out, was about patterns. He smiled. He'd just solved a mystery that had been a long time coming.

"I suppose if you had the algorithm," O'Malley mused, "and figured out one conversation, you could probably crack the whole thing. But we'll never have the algorithm because they'll never give it. That's their secret, captain. And now you've got mine. Tit for tat?"

Lorca chuckled. "Not on your life, Mac."

"Well, can't blame me for trying." O'Malley tipped a tiny bit more alcohol into his cup. "Here's to secrets."

They drank another twenty minutes, discussing the state of the war and life on Discovery, and Lorca sent O'Malley out and went to bed. It was an easy slumber for a change. Even if he did dream briefly that he was crammed in a tiny passage with blood smearing the walls, there was a light in it half-remembered from a similar place in Memory Alpha.

* * *

"It felt like he was taking something out on me. Something put him in a foul mood and he decided to lash out."

"What did you do?"

Lalana and O'Malley were in Lalana's room. O'Malley had gone straight there after leaving Lorca's quarters—not to relieve Larsson, not to see Mischkelovitz (he could barely look at her as he crossed through the lab), but to talk to Lalana. He was standing in the room looking only mildly dazed, which was a testament mostly the amount of alcohol he was capable of drinking when it came down to it. Lalana was on top her coffee table so they were almost eye level with each other.

"I let him attack. Encouraged him, even."

Lalana's eyes gleamed. "Really? Did it not hurt to be attacked?"

"A little, but, my feeling is when a person attacks you, it's because they're scared of something and they're looking for a response that confirms their fears. Shutting down only plays into that narrative, so I did the opposite and opened up. I just hope it doesn't come back to bite me in the ass later." O'Malley frowned and looked at the floor. It was either a great step forward, or a massive mistake on his part.

"I do not think it will. Gabriel does not enjoy biting particularly, though he will do so if you ask."

O'Malley looked up and stared at Lalana. "You're not speaking metaphorically, are you."

"No," said Lalana, clicking her tongue again. Her mischievous irreverence was one of the things that had always endeared her to Lorca.

O'Malley shook his head, wondering how the translation between lului and English was still so literally bad after so many years, but given the issues with qoryan, he did not question it. "The other thing was, it could have been a test."

"If it was, did you pass this test?"

"Hm. I think so, but... I am trying my level best here and it's not going very far. I know it takes time, but it's never taken this much time before. It's like he's never learned how to trust anyone. I really thought I was making progress, too, but then..." O'Malley sighed and rubbed his face.

"Then Cornwell?" asked Lalana.

"Then Cornwell. Gabriel's not the only one she fucked when she slept with him, she also royally screwed us," said O'Malley darkly. Lalana clicked her tongue. O'Malley smiled despite the direness of the situation. "Oh, you think that's funny, do you?"

Eyes gleaming and hands spinning, Lalana said, "Very much so."

"He still doesn't. I think that betrayal was a stone too much."

Lalana sat back on her haunches and stilled her hands. "Then, are you giving up?"

O'Malley was startled by that. "Of course not. I'm in too deep at this point. You said he liked stories, I just gave him mine. And Melly's and John's."

"Do you know," said Lalana, hands once again spinning in delight, "stories are the best present anyone can give." They were, after all, the present that had brought her and Lorca together, and the present that kept them together still.


	71. Above and Beyond

A/N: This covers the remainder of episode 8, "Si Vis Pacem, Para Bellum," and the first part of episode 9, "Into the Forest I Go."

By the way, how strange was it to write lului and then have Pahvans appear in the show? Diffuse cellularly-networked lifeforms that sensors don't see who are one with the forest they live in... what the actual. Lului are very different from Pahvans, but still. I'm on the same wavelength as someone in that writer's room.

The evolutionary difference between lului and Pahvans illuminated in this chapter may be a new detail to the published chapters of this story, but it's actually something that was written back in the beginning. Originally, there was a chapter of Lorca talking to Arzo and Ek'Ez for paragraphs and paragraphs of lului biological and evolutionary analysis and speculation. Fearing no one but me would want to read that much speculative, technical detail, I shelved the chapter, but the full details of it will be in an appendix at the end.

And I swear it on my life, all the cookies in this chapter were one-and-done random draws! (The universe keeps giving providing the most perfect fortunes at various points. I'm beginning to think fate might actually be real.)

* * *

"Incoming transmission from Pahvo," came the announcement from the bridge.

Lorca emerged from the ready room smirking confidently. Finally. That mission had taken entirely longer than it should have and some part of him wondered what Burnham and Tyler had gotten up to on Pahvo. Whatever it was, he hoped they enjoyed it. Their growing affection had not escaped his notice. Had Saru had been flustered by unwittingly playing chaperone? Had he succeeded at it, even? Burnham tended not to let anything get in the way when she wanted something, and even with admiral pips, Saru was no match for her. "Let's hear it."

"Michael Burnham to Discovery! Discovery, do you read me?"

It was very subtle, the rush of adrenaline in her voice, but Lorca could hear it and the smirk faded in an instant. "We read you," he answered.

No reply. He looked at the current communications officer on the bridge, Lieutenant Bryce. "The transmission terminated at the source," Bryce said, pressing buttons on his console.

"Black alert!" ordered Lorca.

It took almost ninety seconds for the rest of the ship to catch up to him and for Stamets to get into the spore chamber. During that ninety seconds, Lorca quietly cursed each one of them for every moment of the delay. Something was not right and they needed to be there ninety seconds ago.

Discovery dropped into orbit well within transporter range, the ship giving the faintest of shudders at the sudden gravitational adjustment. A moment later, there was a strange pulsing thrum, then another. "What the hell was that?"

"The transmitter on the planet," said Owosekun from the ops station. "Detecting three life signs. Two human, one Kelpien."

Owosekun was a very smart officer. If the scans held anything alarming, she would report it immediately, but just to be certain, Lorca said, "Status?"

"No signs of distress," said Owosekun. "We have transporter lock."

"Sir, commlink reestablished," said Bryce.

Lorca nodded, satisfied for the moment by the smooth competence on display around him, and sat down in the captain's chair. "Discovery to landing party. We have a lock on your coordinates. Prepare for transport."

* * *

Standard protocol called for a medical examination after an away mission on an alien planet. Lorca sent word down to sickbay for Culber to send Saru and Burnham up to the ready room as soon as they were cleared.

"Captain," said Culber, and there was an edge to Culber's tone that belied his unease. "Burnham's fine, but Commander Saru... was injured."

Lorca paused, pensive. Thankfully, Culber clarified without prompting, because Lorca hated betraying his sentimentality too blatantly in the presence of the assembled bridge crew:

"He'll be fine, he just needs some rest."

"Then send me Burnham," said Lorca.

Burnham's report was characteristically brusque. "Upon beaming down to the planet..." She detailed their first contact with a species of pacifist organisms she described as a sort of swarm of microorganisms who, absent other means, had devised their musical transmitter as a way to reach out to life out in the stars.

It was a beautiful story, even recounted as impassively as Burnham told it. Lorca munched on a cookie that held the fortune _Your present plans are going to succeed_ as he listened. The Pahvans had not been detected by sensors because, like lului, they were diffusely networked cells. The central difference seemed to be (if Lorca understood Ek'Ez's report on lului evolutionary biology correctly) that the cells making up Lalana's body had evolved into a symbiotic relationship with another species and formed a permanent lattice on top of the other species' structure, creating a third species from the combination, whereas the Pahvan organisms retained their microscopic independence. If you could separate Lalana's cells from her residual skeletal, neural, and optical structures without triggering the rapid cell degradation, she would be a liquid version of a Pahvan.

Burnham was clearly taken with the Pahvans. The only thing missing from her story was a full accounting of whatever had befallen Saru; Burnham seemed to be glossing over that, describing it merely as, "Commander Saru was adversely affected by the Pahvans. As a consequence, the modulator was damaged and the commander wounded."

At least the story ended on a positive: "The Pahvans repaired the modulator and agreed to help us, captain."

Lorca smiled. Mischkelovitz might have just won them the war. "Well done, Burnham." He slid the cookie bowl towards her. She took one, largely out of politeness he suspected, and cracked it, glancing down at the fortune without much reaction.

"If that's all, captain," she said.

"Somewhere you need to be?"

"Commander Saru and Lieutenant Tyler are still being treated in sickbay."

"Then by all means," said Lorca, gesturing for her exit. She thanked him and left. He brushed cookie crumbs from his fingers. She had not done him the favor of relaying her fortune.

* * *

When they looked for Mischkelovitz's cloak detection frequency, they could not find it. It made no sense. According to Burnham, the modulator was online. The transmitter was clearly still active. It was just not transmitting the correct frequency wave.

Then, something happened that made clear the modulator had not worked and instead something had gone very, very wrong. The signal changed, but not in the way they expected. "Check it again," Lorca demanded of Bryce. The results of the first analysis were completely unpalatable.

The analysis was the same the second time.

"Burnham to the bridge!" ordered Lorca from the captain's chair, staring at the viewscreen and frowning. She arrived with Tyler at her side. Lorca's greeting to her was an accusation: "You said the adjustment to the Pahvan transmitter was a success."

"I thought it was," said Burnham.

"Mr. Bryce!" said Lorca sharply.

Bryce clarified the issue for Burnham. "The signal strength has increased by a factor of ten to the twelfth power. The music's gone. All that's being transmitted now is a massive electromagnetic wave."

"Captain, I don't understand, I thought the Pahvans—" began Burnham.

Tyler cut her off. "Sir, Specialist Burnham integrated our technology exactly as ordered. We should now be able to detect any invisible Klingon ships within range of the Pahvan signal."

"Apparently not," said Lorca, glaring at Tyler for interrupting Burnham. That Tyler felt it necessary to leap to Burnham's defense as if she lacked her own agency and required rescue rankled Lorca. What Burnham actually required was clarity on their situation, which Tyler could not provide.

Lorca could. He rose from the captain's chair and strode towards the viewscreen. "The transmitter is now sending a new signal limited to two subspace bands, ours and the Klingons. What you did, Burnham, was invite the enemy to join us here."

He turned towards Burnham and found her staring at him in assessment.

"No," she said, stepping out from behind the science console. She was entirely unintimidated by him, confident in her realization of what had happened. "The Pahvans did that. Their entire existence is an effort to bring harmony to discord and they know about our conflict with the Klingons. They're trying to bring us together. They think they're helping."

"Captain," Rhys interrupted. "Long-range sensors have detected an incoming Klingon vessel. It's entering the sector at high warp."

"Can you identify what it is?"

Tyler joined Rhys at the tactical console. "The Ship of the Dead, sir. The Sarcophagus."

The Klingon flagship. The ship which had, at the Battle of the Binary Stars, rammed and destroyed the Europa. After the battle, the Klingons had affixed the bodies of their dead to the ship's exterior, earning the ship the name "Sarcophagus" in Federation communications and the informal title "Ship of the Dead" among the ranks.

Lorca turned back to the viewscreen. He stared out at the blue-white gem of Pahvo and its two moons sitting suspended against a canopy of stars.

"We're the Pahvan's only line of defense," said Burnham. "We have to protect them, sir. We have to fight."

Lorca pressed the nail of his forefinger against his thumb. This was not going according to plan. As he looked at the planet and the stars and stood there in front of the vista, he began to nod his head slightly. It was a setback, yes, but it was also a very grand opportunity.

One way or another, he was going to forge a legend no one would ever forget here at Pahvo. Georgiou had failed against the Sarcophagus at the Binary Stars. This was a chance to show once and for all who the better captain was.

* * *

The Klingon warship was still hours away. Lorca sent an update to Starfleet on the situation requesting immediate reinforcement. Anticipating a positive response, he began to strategize how they could deploy such reinforcements. Pahvo was not an ideal location for battle, especially given the presence of the Pahvans on the planet below, but there was no way he was going to allow this chance to knock out the Klingon flagship slip away from them. He stood at the tactical console with Tyler, Rhys, and Burnham, going over some general scenarios. Technically, Burnham had no business being in the conversation, but she was too much a busybody to resist inserting herself and she did have some useful insights to offer.

Saru arrived on the bridge. "I am ready to return to duty, captain."

Rather than acknowledge Saru's duty status, Lorca pointed to the ready room and left the others to handle the tactical analyses. Inside, the question was immediate: "Exactly what happened on Pahvo?"

"When the present crisis is over, I will provide a full account in my report," promised Saru. "I will accept any disciplinary action you may wish to take as a result."

"No, now."

Saru was genuinely surprised. "Sir, the Klingons inbound—"

"Just because you're cleared by Culber doesn't mean you're cleared by me," said Lorca. Until Starfleet indicated what the reinforcements would be, their current tactical plans were an exercise in battle preparedness, nothing more. "Just keep it brief."

"Captain," said Saru, "I have failed you." And, because he was honest and unafraid of losing, Saru went so far as to admit, "I have failed myself."

"You got hurt, number one, it happens," said Lorca. Except for a resurgence of self-doubt, Saru seemed entirely fine. Kelpiens were tougher than they looked. Lorca took a cookie and pushed the bowl towards Saru.

Saru glanced at it, downcast. "Thank you, but I do not enjoy processed foods."

"It's all I've got," said Lorca with a frown. Saru, like Groves, never ate fortune cookies, rendering Lorca's standard inducement worthless. Lorca recalled the two had another trait in common. "Computer. Green tea, right?"

Saru looked surprised that Lorca had both noticed this and remembered it, but then, Lorca made it a point to know his crew's particulars more than most. "Yes. With salt."

"Green tea with salt." Because Saru also used the ready room on occasion, the tea emerged from the dispenser exactly as Saru liked it. Saru was further surprised when Lorca joined him at the dispenser and took some decaf coffee. It felt like a sympathetic gesture. When they moved back to the desk, Lorca did not retake his place behind it and instead stood in front with Saru. "All right, let's hear it."

"I regret to inform you that while on the planet, I was compromised..." Saru described, in terms both brief and entirely telling, how the Pahvans had initially had a disorienting effect on him, then an intoxicating one as they alleviated all of the instinctual fears Kelpiens lived with. Lorca was honestly impressed to hear this intoxication had driven Saru to turn on Burnham and Tyler and attempt to sabotage the mission out of a mad desire to stay on Pahvo forever.

"Standing up to Burnham's not an easy thing to do," Lorca noted.

"I was not in my right mind when I did so," said Saru.

"Still." Whatever force had possessed Saru, it had likely brought to the surface something in the Kelpien that had been there all along. He offered Saru the fortune from his cookie. "I think you've earned this."

Saru took it and read aloud, "Your place in life is in the driver's seat." He stared at the paper. It was entirely confusing because yet again Saru felt he had proven himself inadequate to the task of being a captain.

Lorca saw things differently. "Report to your post, number one."

* * *

The news from Starfleet was not what Lorca expected. Admiral Terral was unimpressed by the news of the Sarcophagus' pending arrival. Terral's holographic projection stood with Lorca in front of the viewscreen on the bridge. He outlined that there would be no reinforcements because to send them would draw the attention of the rest of the Klingon fleet and leave other targets potentially undefended. "We have ordered all active starships back behind Federation lines. Retreat, captain, that is an order."

Clearly, Terral was not understanding this opportunity fully. Lorca attempted to explain it again. "Now with the Ship of the Dead on the way here—"

Terral was unmoved. "Yes, General Kol's next strategic move will be to destroy the transmitter, thus eliminating any chance of the Federation gaining an upper hand. But we cannot risk losing the Discovery over this."

Lorca was equally unmoved. "Need I remind you the Klingons don't take threats lightly? By seeming to align themselves with us, the Pahvans just became one. That ship can and will destroy an entire planet in the blink of an eye."

"Your mission to Pahvo was to give us the advantage we sorely needed," said Terral, his voice cool, but the ice gave way to something hotter as he said, "but that mission failed. We have gathered the top scientific minds to devise a solution to crack the invisibility screens that cloak the Klingon warships within the safety of Federation space. Your crew is to join the effort."

They clearly wanted Mischkelovitz, but that was not the worst part of this, because as Lorca listened to Terral, he could only hear the betrayal of everything the Federation stood for. He could also hear the word "failure" ringing in his head. While the mission had not gone according to plan, it was too soon to call it failure when it had presented such an impressive opportunity. It would only be a failure if they walked away now.

With every ounce of steel he had, Lorca said, "You want me to run from a fight and leave a peaceful species to face annihilation?"

"I'm sorry," said Terral, seemingly oddly empathetic for a moment, and then coldly angry again, "but the logic is clear. You _will_ jump to Starbase 46. Immediately."

And Terral hung up on Lorca.

Lorca's mouth opened and closed. This wasn't happening. This wasn't the Starfleet he knew. This wasn't the Starfleet Burnham espoused herself to be, the Starfleet that had backed his proposal for Discovery to use science rather than brute power to find a way to win, the Starfleet that represented coming together for the greater good. Also, he was the one who hung up on Terral, not the other way around. "Lieutenant Detmer, set a course for Starbase 46. Warp five."

"Yes, captain."

"Sir," said Saru. "The Pahvans are more vulnerable than Admiral Terral could possibly understand. Please, if I could only speak with him and relay my experience with their peace-loving species..."

Lorca strode past Saru. He went to the captain's chair and stood behind it. From this position, he was standing in the heart of the bridge in more ways than one. "At this speed they'll be expected us in three hours at Starbase 46. That's why we're warping and not using the spore drive. I have no intention of reaching our destination. But if you're planning on disobeying a direct order, best not to advertise the fact. So. You all heard the panicked admiral. Starfleet is tired of fighting the Klingon cloaking devices and losing. So am I. We have just under three hours to find a solution. If we can, we jump back, defend Pahvo. If we can't..." He spread his arms wide. The consequences if they failed went entirely without saying. "Let's get to it!"

The bridge immediately rushed to carry out his command.

"Lieutenant Stamets! I'm gonna need some reasonable explanation for Starfleet as to why we're currently not using the spore drive. I understand you had some trouble with your interface upgrades?"

Stamets entirely followed what Lorca was proposing. They were in sync. "Now that you mention it, um... has been a little... itchy." He scratched at the implant on his arm.

"That's unfortunate. Get down to the medical bay, get a full examination."

And then out of sync again, as always. "Is... is that completely necessary, sir?"

"It's obligatory. I want Dr. Culber to run every single test possible. We need the data trail."

* * *

They came up with a potential solution.

Under the assumption the Klingon cloak operated using a massive gravitational field, Burnham and Saru proposed deploying sensors aboard the Sarcophagus which would reveal otherwise imperceptible flaws in the cloak from within and enable the creation of a sensor algorithm capable of detecting those specific flaws from outside the cloak.

"There is a problem, though, sir," said Burnham. "It will take time to gather sufficient data."

"How much time?" asked Lorca.

"Days," said Burnham.

Someone had once said when you didn't have enough space, you should look to time, and when there wasn't enough time, then to look for space. They were presently short on time. The answer, therefore, was obvious to Lorca. "Well, we don't have days. But we do have a spore drive."

He went straight to Lab 26. Mischkelovitz had not been paying any attention to events aboard the ship or down on the planet and was surprised and annoyed to learn her frequency modulation had not been carried out as intended. Months of development and all that musical inspiration down the drain. There was no other transmitter that had the properties of the one on Pahvo. Mischkelovitz was further aggravated to learn the reason for all this was apparently her internal nemesis, Michael Burnham.

"Moving on," said Lorca sharply, because they had no time to dwell on this failure and he needed her to focus on the actual problem in front of them right now involving the sensory data. "Can you devise a _pattern_ of jumps that will compensate?"

Mischkelovitz stared at Lorca. Her voice and eyes went dark and wild in that odd way they sometimes did as she intoned, "Patterns are my specialty."

He ignored the urge to shudder at the change. "Then hop to it, doctor, because we need this yesterday."

Mischkelovitz turned to look at Groves, who was in the corner as always. "Rohv-elen, je ma kraht bi'siikraten. Sah tohno chess bakaa'ten."

"Kesbediil," answered Groves with a shrug, putting down his padd. Whatever they were saying, Lorca decided it was potentially a very good sign they were both involved and left them to it. Besides, he almost felt like he understood them this time. Now that he knew the words were somehow meaningless, it felt like the first step to understanding qoryan was to stop focusing on the words entirely and just use the context and tone. In his mind, Mischkelovitz was saying, _Rove, I need your help. Stop playing chess._ Followed by a response akin to, _If I must_.

And ten minutes later, a proposal of jumps arrived that would solve all their problems at once. "I can finish the map with this, too," said Mischkelovitz. "That was a really good insight, captain, compensating for the short time frame with vultiple mectors in space."

Lorca smiled. "I do have my moments."

* * *

When Lorca sent Stamets down to sickbay to generate a data trail, he had not intended for that bit of subterfuge to bear any fruit. Unfortunately, it had. Culber practically glowered at Lorca as he revealed changes in the structure of Stamets' brain.

Lorca looked at the display. He had no clear concept of what these neurological changes meant. "Have you experienced any side effects of a consequence of that?" he asked, in a voice gentler than Culber ever expected to hear towards Stamets.

Stamets shook his head. "No, captain."

"Well I'm not ready to play roulette with his brain," said Culber.

"Duly noted, doctor. Send the report directly to me."

Culber did not find this acceptable in the slightest. "Captain!"

"To me, doctor, and I shall read it. Lieutenant, follow me."

* * *

He shared Mischkelovitz and Groves' jump sequence with Stamets in the ready room.

"You want me to make one hundred and thirty-three jumps?" asked Stamets. Shocked was an understatement.

"Micro-jumps," clarified Lorca. "Each one performed in rapid succession will provide a three-dimensional snapshot of the cloaked Klingon ship's position. The readings will be received from every necessary vector in under four minutes." _Three-dimensional snapshot_ was a Groves contribution. He remained excellent at analogizing science terminology in ways anyone could understand.

Stamets was not completely convinced. "That will give us the data to calculate the algorithm, but... it'll take time to compute something that complex."

"I have faith in Mr. Saru," said Lorca.

"Captain, there has to be another way. You heard—"

"I wish there were." Lorca looked at Stamets with an expression of forlorn sincerity. "I wish I didn't have to ask you to make this sacrifice, but the Klingons won't stop until they've destroyed everything in their path, everyone, and we can't stop them without the spore drive. Without you."

"You're asking us to use the drive in ways we've never conceived of." In ways Stamets had never conceived of, because Stamets only saw part of the picture. "The spore delivery system isn't configured to handle the amount of volume that would be required!"

"And that's gonna stop you?" asked Lorca, moving over behind the desk. The streaks of the warp field shimmered in the window behind him. "I don't think so. I know what drives you. You're not just a scientist, you're an explorer. You could have stayed in a lab on Earth, but you chose to go where no one has gone before. Let me show you something."

He activated the hologram of the mycelial map.

It was so perfect. All those many possibilities from months ago had been whittled down to one concrete set of coordinate lines. All that was missing were some data points to fill in some lingering gaps.

Stamets approached the display. "You've been accumulating this data from my jumps the whole time?"

"Mm-hm," said Lorca, offering the tiniest little nod of confirmation.

"And these scattered pockets of negative mass, it's... they could indicate alternative parallel universes connected to the mycelial network." There was no misreading the possibility of that now. Mischkelovitz had seen it right from the start and now her map made it obvious for anyone to see. "And with more jumps, we could find a pattern! Perhaps even the coordinates to reach them." Stamets gazed with wide-eyed awe through the map at Lorca.

Lorca moved to join Stamets on the other side so they were looking at the map together, from the same angle. "You showed me this invention could take us to places that we never dreamed we could reach. This is far beyond our preconceptions of time and space."

Finally, Stamets could see it. In their first interactions, he had thought Lorca a bloodthirsty monster come to take his research and pervert it for the purposes of war, but now he could see what had always been the truest part of Lorca, the part that was known to those who knew Lorca best. Jackson Benford had called it the wonderment. Stamets smiled. "Captain, I didn't know you cared."

"We have to win this war," said Lorca, "but then..." The possibilities were as infinite as the sentiment was open-ended.

Stamets knew how to finish it. "Then the journey continues. If we can save Pahvo, defeat the Klingons, and do all this, one hundred and thirty-three jumps it is."


	72. All the Fears You Hold So Dear

A/N: Takes place during episode 9, "Into the Forest I Go."

* * *

With the Sarcophagus bearing down on Pahvo, Stamets' team kicked into overdrive making the necessary modifications to the spore delivery system. They were not the only ones rushing against a deadline. Dr. Culber, without even knowing or understanding the full scope of what they were about to attempt, sent his preliminary medical report to Lorca, desperate to get it on record before any more jumps could further jeopardize his husband's health.

As promised, Lorca read it, but it seemed less a clear and balanced accounting of the changes to Stamets' brain and more a general "no more jumps" missive owing to the fact Culber had no idea what was happening to Stamets. None of them did.

One person might. Lorca forwarded the report to Mischkelovitz to answer the one, crucial question it raised: could Stamets complete the jump sequence?

"You understand I'm a biomedical engineer, not a neurologist?" was her response.

"You're telling me with a brain like yours you've never been curious about that branch of medicine?"

"I didn't say that," she said, sounding a little perturbed over the comms.

"You know the spore drive. You designed that implant. You tell me, can Mr. Stamets do it?"

"Of course," said Mischkelovitz. "It's distance that makes the calculations so hard, because of the probabilistic nature of the drive. The key issue here isn't anything to do with distance. Since the micro-jumps requires very little calculation, it's just that he'll have do a bunch of small calculations in sequence, compounding the stress of each individual action. In so much as he's _doing_ the calculations, because after all we're not talking about somebody thinking about a math problem so much as it is iological bintegration into the spore displacement system allowing for..."

"Lorca out." This was maybe a little unkind, but he did not have time to listen to a technical breakdown of why Stamets' integration into the spore drive system made the spore drive work. He only needed to know that it would.

The next question was who was going to beam over to install the sensors on the Klingon flagship during that brief window of time before it raised its shields. Lorca directed Tyler to prep a boarding party to carry out this task. Tyler immediately requested Burnham for it.

"Out of the question, it's too dangerous," said Lorca.

Burnham objected. She had been on the Sarcophagus before. It was where Georgiou had died. According to Burnham, only she knew how to access the ideal location for the sensor on the ship's bridge, and simply telling someone else what to do would not suffice. From the way Burnham described her knowledge of the Klingon ship, you would almost think she had been born and spent her entire life there.

"You're not going," said Lorca, and sat down in his chair.

To anyone else, this move would have indicated some finality in the discussion. Not Burnham, of course. Never Burnham. Being told no only doubled her determination to be the one to carry out this mission. Undeterred, she said firmly, "You are the captain, but you are not using the full resources to ensure the success of your mission. There is no logic to your thinking."

Lorca shook his head. She was being ridiculous. Vulcans, as Admiral Terral made quite obvious, were not nearly as stoically logical a species as they purported to be. Unfortunately, Burnham had swallowed this whole faux-logical ethos hook, line, and sinker. Now, like every Vulcan Lorca had ever met, Burnham's invocation of logic was not an application of logical thought so much as a broad justification for what she herself wanted to do.

Then she said something that threw him.

"Unless this is about me."

Lorca turned to look at Burnham. That was a rather bold assertion on her part. There was nothing he hated quite like being called out, especially when whatever he was being called out for contained some kernel of the truth.

She stated her case before the whole bridge crew because she knew it would force his hand. "I'm here on borrowed time. When you asked me to stay, it was to help you win this war. Given the time I spent on that Klingon vessel, I'm the most qualified crewmember to place those sensors. Otherwise, I have no purpose here."

Lorca looked towards Saru. He could see no disagreement in the Kelpien's face. They both knew there was no way to get Burnham to happily comply with any order she did not agree with. She remained, largely thanks to Georgiou's particular brand of command training, an impossible person to command.

"Fine," said Lorca, because fighting Burnham was hopeless. The only way to stop her doing what she wanted was to throw her in the brig, but if he did that, she would never forgive him for letting someone else do the job she felt was rightfully hers. Especially if the mission then failed. "Execute the mission as ordered and get back safely."

"Thank you, captain."

And like that, she was gone. Lorca's fingers tightened slightly on the armrests of the captain's chair. Georgiou had done them all so many disservices with the training of Burnham. Of course, Georgiou had paid the ultimate price for that mistake, and all Lorca could do now was to hope her protégé did not follow in her mentor's footsteps and suffer the same fate in the same place.

* * *

The drive modifications were ready. The away team was ready. Everything was primed and ready to go. Lorca had only to give the order. Do this, and one of two outcomes would result. Either they would crack the Klingon cloak and prove once and for all he knew better than anyone else how to win this war, or Burnham and Tyler were going to die and it would be out of his power to prevent it.

"Black alert. Let's jump back to Pahvo."

They knew the Klingons were there already. The Klingon cloak did not hide the warp signature of a ship of that size. It did, however, conceal the ship while it was in orbit, as it was right now. Discovery blipped into orbit around Pahvo and waited.

Based on the location of the Pahvan transmitter and the Klingons' incoming travel vector, Lorca had a pretty good idea where he would be if he was the Klingon flagship. When the Sarcophagus decloaked in a shimmer of green particles to greet Discovery, Lorca was gratified to see he had put Discovery smack dab in front of the massive Klingon vessel, right off its bow.

It was so much bigger than Discovery. Like a lion to a mouse. From his seat in the captain's chair, Lorca thought the Ship of the Dead and the barnacle-like infestations of corpses on its surface looked massively ugly compared to Discovery's sleek beauty.

"Sir," reported Saru, "Lieutenant Tyler and Specialist Burnham have successfully beamed aboard the Klingon vessel."

"Excellent." They had the Klingons' attention. Lorca commanded them into an evasive pattern and they drew the Sarcophagus away from the gentle pacifists of Pahvo. That was step one.

Step two depended on Tyler and Burnham. Aboard the Klingon vessel, they planted the two sensors. "Captain," reported Saru, "the second sensor is online."

"Then let's make it happen," said Lorca. "Let's give them a little taste of what the Discovery is capable of."

Discovery began to jump circles around the Klingons. Each jump, it paused just long enough to deliver a payload of torpedoes. The Klingons could not track Discovery, could not retaliate against it, so they began to cloak. Making themselves invisible was their only card to play.

"Commence jump sequence," said Lorca as the cloak engaged.

"Engaging spore drive jump in five, four, three, two, one..."

"Go!"

Discovery was nowhere and everywhere. The stars flashed across the viewscreen, there one moment and gone the next, impossibly changing in the blink of an eye from one configuration to another.

On the sixty-third jump, Culber's voice, alarmed: "Engineering to bridge! We have to abort!"

"We have seventy jumps left, doctor," said Lorca, calm because he had to be, because everyone needed that from him right now.

Culber was frantic. "Call it off, now!"

They were already headed down this path. There was no turning back. Lorca ordered Culber to do everything necessary keep Stamets alive through the jump sequence for the sake of the trillions of lives depending on them, and for Tyler and Burnham, who had beamed over to the Sarcophagus on a mission he had every intent on seeing them return from. He listened, shifting uneasily as Culber rattled off and applied medical protocols to Stamets from outside the spore chamber.

"I love you, too," he heard Culber say. Lorca cut the audio from engineering.

They kept jumping. One hundred and thirty-three jumps. As the protocol ended and they settled into a single point in space, they were momentarily sitting ducks, but nothing happened.

"Why aren't they firing?" wondered Lorca aloud, staring at the empty viewscreen. With the cloak active, it was impossible to know if the Klingons were still in the same spot they had been a minute ago. This was the Klingons' opportunity to retaliate from a completely unpredictable position. Lorca could think of only one reason they were not doing so. "They're thinking of leaving. I would. We're not going anywhere till we have Burnham and Tyler back."

No one was getting left behind. They waited with bated breath for the computer to complete the algorithm that would break the cloak. It felt like it was taking forever.

Then: "Captain, I've got it. The algorithm is ready. We have their cloaking signature. Transferring to transporter room control."

Lorca settled slightly, feeling the tenseness leave his shoulders. "Bring 'em home, number one."

They came home.

They did not come home alone.

"Sir, Lieutenant Tyler and Specialist Burnham are safely back aboard. Along with... Admiral Cornwell, who's been injured, and a Klingon prisoner who's been taken into custody."

Lorca looked straight to the viewscreen and the stars. "An extra prize," he managed, swallowing his rising discomfort as he ordered all available photon torpedoes to target the still-cloaked Klingon ship. He rose from his chair, strode towards the viewscreen, and sprayed the ocular agent into his eyes in preparation for what was about to happen.

"And _fire_."

The viewscreen lit with the brilliant white flash of the explosion. It bathed the whole of the bridge in light. He had succeeded where no one else in Starfleet had. The Sarcophagus was no more.

It was tremendous but unsatisfying, because even though this was a truly magnificent and decisive blow against their enemy, as he looked at it he was struck by the fact Cornwell should have been on it. He turned away, unable to finish the lightshow, and caught sight of Burnham and Tyler arriving on the bridge. Burnham's face was bloody but determined and vindicated at the sight of this small piece of vengeance for Captain Georgiou.

Lorca could manage only a grimace as he passed her and moved into his ready room. As the door slid shut behind him, he slammed both of his fists onto his desk with all the force he could muster and let out a silent scream against the glossy surface. He clenched his jaw and shook with silent fury.

This was not happening. This was supposed to be his triumph. This was supposed to be the moment that forged his legend for everyone to see, cemented his place in the minds of everyone so they would not doubt him ever again. Instead he felt sick, like he was going to vomit, because the one person who could take it all away was again in a position to do just that.

He looked up, out at the stars through the window, utter hopelessness written on every on inch of him. Those stars. He wanted them more than anything. Those tiny little lights. They suddenly seemed so far away.

* * *

O'Malley awoke to a comm signal. He had not slept well. Battles were not typically conducive to sleep, and a battle in which they took several hits while luring the Klingons away from Pahvo, executed a hundred and thirty-three spore jumps, launched every photon torpedo, and blew the largest ship in the Klingon fleet into smithereens was particularly hard to sleep through.

It was Lalana. "Admiral Cornwell has returned," she said.

There were a thousand things in O'Malley's head. He was genuinely relieved to hear Cornwell was not dead and for a moment he was even happy about it, but then he realized what this potentially meant, because Lalana was calling him, something she had never done, and also when she knew he was supposed to be sleeping, which she would not do except in the most dire of circumstances. "Where is she?"

"She is here on Discovery."

O'Malley threw his clothes on in record time and jogged down the hall, pulling on his uniform jacket as he went and running his fingers through the mess of hair on his head to little effect.

At first, the doctor said Cornwell was not well enough for visitors, but at the sight of O'Malley, Cornwell insisted. O'Malley walked briskly over and initially showed the same elation he had felt upon hearing the news of her return.

"Admiral, you're..." The elation drained from O'Malley's face as he stopped himself from saying any of the unfortunate words he might have said. She was back, but she could have been back so much sooner. Was she safe? Debatable. Was she any form of unharmed? Unlikely. She was also staring at O'Malley with a look that was entirely unforgiving.

"He's still in command," she said. "Why is he still in command?"

All O'Malley could do was stare in apology. "I'm sorry, admiral. I..." There was no apology that would suffice.

Cornwell turned away from O'Malley and looked at the nearest medical technician. "Get me a direct line to Admiral Terral."

She did not have to say the words for O'Malley to know he was dismissed, and know equally that there was nothing, absolutely nothing he could do to change her mind.

He went straight to the bridge. Lorca was in his ready room still. The look that passed between them spoke volumes. Lorca could think of only one reason O'Malley would be up here instead of sleeping, especially in light of what had just occurred, and O'Malley looked resigned to something awful.

"I thought she was dead," said O'Malley. "And I'd come to terms with that. Which is why I didn't say anything, but... The admiral I had clout with? Was Admiral Gessirin."

Admiral Gessirin had died two weeks earlier.

"I'll keep trying," promised O'Malley, but Lorca could hear it in O'Malley's voice. There was nothing O'Malley could do.

Lorca tried to speak with Cornwell, too, before she was whisked away on a medical shuttle. He managed to mouth her name at her in a silent but hopeful and encouraging plea from across the medical bay only to watch her to turn her head away.

He saw, too, the look of abject disgust from Dr. Culber at what he had forced Stamets to do. One hundred and thirty-three jumps. He left sickbay and went to his quarters. His crew looked at him with adulation as he passed them, crediting him with not just the recent victory, but the sense they all felt of victories to come.

As much as he wished he could feel what they felt, the only thing he felt now was empty.

* * *

When Terral called, Lorca took the call only as a two-dimensional video signal because at this point, it was the only crumbling vestige of control he still had over anything. Terral said, "Admiral Cornwell's emergency medical shuttle has successfully arrived at Starbase 88. She is currently undergoing surgery. I am told she should make a full recovery."

Lorca paced about the ready room as they spoke. He had to, partly because he was tense with unease, partly because he felt the need to do what he could to hide his face.

"It's excellent news," said Lorca, turning away from the viewscreen. "Make sure to send her my best. Planet of Pahvo is safe, the cloak-breaking algorithm is being refined for fleet-wide use as we speak and will be transmitted on a secure channel to you in just under eleven hours." His choice to mention these most recent achievements was entirely calculated and, unfortunately, almost as transparent.

"The sooner the better," said Terral. He knew humans well enough to know that the way Lorca was pacing indicated an elevated level of stress.

Lorca moved to the fortune cookie bowl and took one in his hand. It helped. He managed to stop pacing as he ran his fingers over the familiar shape.

"There are reports of cloaked Klingon vessels advancing on our borders and on you. The war is not won yet, but you have increased the likelihood of a victory for Starfleet despite your... unorthodox methods."

Over the preceding weeks, Lorca and Terral's every interaction had been marked by a simmering rage on the part of the Vulcan, but now, Terral was entirely calm. Too calm. Even his dismissal of Lorca's methods as "unorthodox"—a clear insult coming from a Vulcan—was marked only by the mildest note of disdain.

"I'm gonna take that as a compliment," said Lorca, managing vague indignance. His fingers closed around the cookie in his hand.

"Now it is time for Discovery to return to safety. Report to Starbase 46. You will find that your accomplishments have not gone unnoticed. Starfleet Command would like to award you with the Legion of Honor. I look forward to congratulating you in person."

Again, total stillness and calmness, and as Terral spoke the words "Legion of Honor," it felt like there was no sincerity in it. After a period of mutual silence, Terral ended the transmission.

Lorca leaned forward, sliding his forearms against the desk, still turning the cookie over in his fingers. He knew from the comm logs that Cornwell had made one call before leaving Discovery, to Terral.

It was entirely too obvious what was happening. He would be damned before he let Terral and Cornwell take Discovery away from him.


	73. Where Once Was Light

A/N: Covers the remainder of episode 9, "Into the Forest I Go." Sorry for the delay, I wrote the chapter one way, then decided to scrap it and do it over. And then went for a third go to restore some of the content I regretting losing from the first revision! Also, it took a long time to figure out the exact code Lorca keyed into the console, but I think I got it right in the end.

Cornwell fans: I know this is probably a rocky road for you since "The Stars, Broken," but I promise you, you're going to get what you need by the time this journey is over.

* * *

On the surface it seemed like there was no way out, but command politics, like space battles, were largely a question of advantageous positioning. Lorca was too good a strategist to accept a no-win scenario on any front. Not when he had so many other victories to fall back on.

In the past day alone, he had destroyed the Sarcophagus, protected Pahvo, and inadvertently rescued Cornwell. There were doubtless captains out there who would rather see Lorca leading the fleet then Terral. Coupled with his unparalleled ability to utilize the spore drive, removing him from Discovery at this critical junction could only be seen as tactical folly. The remaining admiralty had to recognize that.

Problem was, as the number of admirals shrank, Cornwell's voice became louder and louder. Never mind that she and Terral were demonstrably buffoons when it came to military strategy. She might get her way if she poured honey in enough ears.

He had to neutralize Cornwell. She had been tortured by Klingons for weeks. He could make the case she was not in her right mind and had conflated or misremembered events as a result. There was O'Malley's report to consider, but it was entirely nonspecific. What if he convinced Lalana or Mischkelovitz to claim the report was about one of them? He could doubly frame Cornwell as a jealous ex-lover with an axe to grind. O'Malley might be a hard sell, but supposing Mischkelovitz were game, the colonel could be pressured into compliance. He would do anything for his sister.

Cornwell had tried to come after his command. It would be interesting to see if her career could survive the accusations Lorca was prepared to level at her.

The comm sounded. "Culber to Lorca. You asked to be informed when Lieutenant Stamets was clear to return to duty."

There was a cold formality to Culber's words. "Thank you, doctor."

"Captain, I'm going to say something, and I need you to listen to me and hear what I'm telling you." Culber waited for acknowledgment, half expecting Lorca to close the channel.

"I'm listening."

"Paul could have died." As formal as the initial contact had been, it was now clearly entirely personal. "I warned you it was too dangerous."

"He didn't," said Lorca. Stamets had been exhausted by the ordeal, but the exhaustion passed, and he was now back to normal, or whatever passed for normal nowadays. "Dr. Mischkelovitz said he'd be fine and he is."

Culber exploded, but quickly pulled himself back to a more measured tone, aware he had to curtail his emotions the given the current audience. "He isn't _fine_ , captain! We are talking about _cumulative neurological damage_."

Damage so unremarkable, Culber had not noticed it for weeks despite living with Stamets. That implied something a little different to Lorca. "Changes," said Lorca. "We're talking about neurological changes, the extent of which, by your own—"

That Lorca would downplay the significance of this made Culber want to throw out the Hippocratic Oath and sock Lorca in the jaw. It was probably a good thing they were speaking over the comms. "Captain! When we reach Starbase 46, I intend to lodge a formal complaint."

Lorca was still holding the cookie in his hand from the end of his conversational with Terral. His fingers tightened, cracking it unintentionally. He dropped the broken pieces onto the desk. "If you want to do so, that's your right, but let me make something clear, doctor. I didn't order Lieutenant Stamets into that spore drive. I merely asked. He got in there to save the aliens down on that planet because your husband is the sort of man who would do anything to stop an injustice against an innocent species." Stamets had proven as much when he subjected himself to a lateral genetic transfer rather than let Ripper suffer one more jump as the spore drive's biocomputer. "For what it's worth, I'm proud of him. There aren't many people would make that choice and risk themselves to save a planet of strangers. All I did was provide the opportunity for him to show exactly what kind of man he is. That's all I've ever asked from my crew: for them to be exactly who they are."

The sentiment left Culber stunned. That Lorca had said or thought any part of it did not remove the fact Stamets' brain was fundamentally changed in ways none of them fully understand, but it certainly gave Culber pause on his stated course of action.

Lorca continued, "Now I understand you're upset because you love him, so if you want to blame me, fine, but I won't stand in the way of Stamets being who he is. I have to believe that's part of why you married him."

Lorca listened to the dead air on the other end of the line with some degree of satisfaction. To underscore the assertion being made about who was in the right and who was wrong here, Lorca added, "I appreciate the heads up on your complaint. If there's nothing else?"

"I want to go on record and state it is my medical recommendation that Lieutenant Stamets not conduct any further jumps with the spore drive," said Culber firmly, back to full professionalism. "To do so would be an undue risk to his health. We need to make do without the drive until after Paul has been cleared by Starfleet Medical."

"Duly noted. Lorca out." Lorca looked down at the crumble of cookie pieces on his desk and extracted the fortune from the mess. _Your future is as boundless as the lofty heaven._

So long as he had the spore drive, the universe, like this little slip of paper, sat in the palm of his hand. All he had to do was make sure the spore drive, despite Culber's medical advice, still remained in play. Besides, if anyone was a hero in what they had just done, it was Paul Stamets.

He drafted up a communique and directed it to Admiral Terral.

 _Decline Legion of Honor. Give Lt. Paul Stamets, instrumental in Discovery success._ The message was practically in pidgin. Lorca was going to take back all that power over Terral, Cornwell or no, and an intentionally terse, bordering on grammatically unsound missive was a step in the right direction.

* * *

Aware the clock was running, Lorca went to Lab 26. O'Malley was on the door. He offered Lorca only a cursory grimace and "captain" in greeting; they were both too overly conscious of and disappointed in O'Malley's recent ineffectuality to be in any mood to speak to one another.

Mischkelovitz, on the other hand, was excited to see Lorca, immediately dimming the lights and conjuring up the map. "It's done! What do you think?"

"It's incredible," said Lorca, reaching up to touch the holographic display as if to make sure it was real.

"Shakespearean," said a voice, and Lorca jerked his hand back in surprise. Lalana was standing in the doorway to her room. He could see the map reflected in her eyes as she stepped forward.

Lorca closed the map. "Sorry. Classified."

"Really? I believe my clearance is as high as yours." A kind lie; in actuality, because of the intelligence work she had done over the past decade, hers was technically higher.

"Eyes only," he clarified.

Lalana came right up to the workbench, grabbing the edge of the table to steady herself in a standing position. "Will you not make an exception for these eyes? I have already seen it, after all, and who would I tell? The two people I know best are in this room."

Stamets had seen the map, too, though not in its completed form. "All right." Lorca brought the display back up. "It's a map might take us to other universes."

"Definitely," said Mischkelovitz.

Lalana could not interact with holographic displays correctly so she relied upon Mischkelovitz to manipulate the map for her. Mischkelovitz deftly displayed the map's features: the locations of previous jumps, the color-coded navigable routes, the lines that curved away into another universe, or perhaps infinite universes.

"Truly it is amazing," said Lalana, "though are there not enough stars in this universe for you to explore? Must you also have another?"

"Who knows," said Lorca. "Maybe there's a universe out there where I'm an emperor, and Mischkelovitz is Einstein, Hawking, and Curie combined."

"Or at least a universe where everybody doesn't think I'm a monster," said Mischkelovitz bitterly.

Lorca's expression softened and he looked at Mischkelovitz with something approaching pity. "Maybe. Assuming you can find a way to implement these coordinates."

"There's nothing to implement. I don't know if our spore drive can get us there, but technically it's the same coordinate set," said Mischkelovitz.

"Oh? Then, there's nothing stopping us?"

"I wouldn't say that exactly... It isn't as easy as just jumping within the reference frame of a single universe."

"Is it dependent on particle resonance?" asked Lalana.

Mischkelovitz looked at Lalana with a confused expression, not because the question made no sense, but because it made too much sense. "The coordinates are farther away in a nonlinear dimension so it would take a lot more processing power than we have to reach them," she explained, then started to think aloud, "though, particle resonance could be used as a targeting component, and explain how multiple realities can exist in layered instances of spacetime connecting to the mycelial plane as a singular, unified frame of reference."

"Can the box do it?" asked Lorca. The lului box, ostensibly the focus of Mischkelovitz's current non-map research.

Again, Mischkelovitz looked at Lalana, this time with a faint expression of panic.

"We have good and bad news about that!" Lalana announced. "The good news is, the box is operational. The bad news is, the internal battery is still charging. We cannot confirm it will be effective until it is charged."

"Then let's get it charged."

"It is charging itself already! It uses an exotic and rare particle, so it will take some time."

"How long?"

"Twelve years."

Lorca stared. "What?"

"That is not very long to a lului," pointed out Lalana.

It was not, but it was entirely too long for them. "Then can we find some more particles?"

"Alas, the particles only exist in subspace, and we have no way of extracting them."

"The technology to do so is only theoretical at present," offered Mischkelovitz, sounding as uncertain as anyone could be. "Maybe in a few years I can have a prototype extractor designed."

Lorca leaned against the worktable. "One step at a time," he sighed. "Speaking of, I have a favor to ask. Two, if you'd be so kind."

"Is one of them sex?" asked Mischkelovitz hopefully.

Lorca realized he had inadvertently created a new kind of monster. Was this going to happen every time he encountered Mischkelovitz from now on? Part of him wished he had stuck to cookies. Her social ineptitude was only fun when it was at the expense of someone else's time and sanity. "No, but hear me out, and nothing's off the table."

"Nothing?" asked Lalana, perking up.

"Enough!" said Lorca sharply, and made his first request.

Mischkelovitz turned out to be entirely amenable to playing a role in Lorca's ploy, sympathetic as she was to the plight of requiring special sleeping accommodations. Her acceptance was compounded by Lorca's seemingly offhand but entirely calculated use of the words, "Consider it pulling one over on the adults back at Starfleet Command." O'Malley would be furious when he found out, but Lorca could handle the colonel easily enough. The colonel had essentially served up his loyalties on a platter with that QORYA story.

The second request turned out to be the harder sell. "Now, I don't mean to alarm you, but we have Klingons headed our way from almost every direction. Normally, it'd be a three-hour trip by warp to Starbase 46, but we can't take a route that direct, not with the Klingons between us and there, which means we gotta take a route a little more scenic. This increases the likelihood we run into more Klingons, or that they try and head us off."

"Then let's jump," said Mischkelovitz.

"Unfortunately, Dr. Culber has advised no more jumps."

Mischkelovitz stared. "But why?"

"That jump sequence took a lot outta Stamets and Culber doesn't trust the changes in his brain. You might say he's been spooked. Unfortunately, without a safe jump to un-spook him, it looks like we're taking the long way. Unless..." Lorca's eyebrows raised and he looked at Mischkelovitz with an expectant smile. "Perhaps you could convince Dr. Culber?"

The confusion on Mischkelovitz's face deepened. "Me?"

"You're friends now, right? All I need you to do is go and cry some of those beautiful tears at him, let him see how upset you'll be if we don't make it to our destination in one piece. We are beset on all sides, Mischka. It'd be a damn shame if that cloaking algorithm you and Saru worked so hard on never saw the light of day. An even bigger shame if we all got blown to smithereens."

Lalana watched them both with rapt attention. Her hands were still gripping the edge of the table, or else they would have been spinning with delight. She had missed watching Lorca at work firsthand. It was her favorite thing to watch in all the universe.

"You won't let us get blown up," said Mischkelovitz, with the fervent loyalty of the child she so frequently expressed herself to be.

"We've been lucky so far," said Lorca, reaching his hand up and cupping Mischkelovitz's cheek. "Luck can run out. Do you want to risk it when we have a safe way to travel right here, if only Dr. Culber can be convinced to let us use it?"

"I don't think I can cry on command," said Mischkelovitz.

The one thing she could be counted on to do and she doubted it. "Want to know a secret? All you have to do is find the thing that's true in what you're saying."

"It is true," said Lalana, "that it would be a terrible shame if we all ended up like Milosz did back at the Battle of the Binary Stars. Myself, Gabriel, John, and Macarius. Can you picture it? All of us, dead or dying, right in front of you."

Tears began to well in Mischkelovitz's eyes. Lorca smiled. "That's my girl," he said, patting her cheek. "Now run along and don't let your brother see those tears."

Mischkelovitz nodded, wiped at her eyes, took a deep breath to steady herself, and fled.

"Don't forget about the algorithm," Lorca called after her as the inner doors closed. He leaned against the worktable and fixed Lalana with a wry frown. "Really, Lalana? Milosz? I don't know if you needed to go that far."

"It helped you attain the desired result, did it not?"

"Still. That was overkill." Probably invoking O'Malley would have been enough.

"Better overkill than half-measures," said Lalana cheerily.

Lorca smirked at her. He loved it when she expressed herself in pithy platitudes. "We should put that in a fortune cookie."

* * *

"The important thing is we get you in front of someone who better understands this," said Culber, giving Stamets' shoulder a squeeze. They were in sickbay still, going over Stamets' scans.

"I didn't realize it was this bad," said Stamets. "I feel..." He shrugged. Fine wasn't the right word, but he also didn't feel _bad_. Different worked, but even he was not sure what it meant in this context.

"I know how important your work is to you," said Culber, the beginning of a consolation he felt Stamets needed.

"Forget that," said Stamets. "You're more important. I'm sorry I kept it from you, I just..."

Culber slid his arm across Stamets' back, pulling Stamets in and leaning his head against Stamets' shoulder. "The important thing is we're going to get through this together."

The doors slid open and Mischkelovitz came skidding in and rushed over to them, oblivious to the fact she was interrupting a private conversation. "Hugh!" she exclaimed at Culber with wide-eyed fear. Then her eyes shifted to Stamets and her expression became a disturbing scowl. "And... _person_."

" _Paul_ ," Stamets scowled back at her. He had not forgotten their altercation over the spores. "But to you, it's Lieutenant Stamets."

Culber was well aware of that altercation. As much as he had tried to explain to Stamets that Mischkelovitz required a little more patience than most, it seemed she and Stamets were intent on picking back up right where they had left off.

But then Mischkelovitz stopped herself, stared down at the floor, and her jaw began to tremble. She squeezed her eyes shut and started silently crying.

"Dr. Mischkelovitz?"

"I don't want everyone I love to die!" she wept, balling her hands into fists and pressing them to her face.

Culber and Stamets exchanged a look. All of Stamets' ire had vanished, replaced by a concern matching Culber's. "Why would you say that?" asked Stamets.

"That's not going to happen," promised Culber.

Mischkelovitz let out a plaintive wail. "But there's Klingons everywhere! We'll never make it! And I don't—I don't want to watch him die, too!"

Another look passed between Stamets and Culber. The question, unvoiced, was plain to both of them: was she crying about Lorca? (She was not, of course, but neither of them had any cause to know any better.)

"They know we killed the Ship of the Dead! They're coming for us! And they'll get us, they'll get us!" She directed this last bit at Stamets.

Culber gently put a hand on Stamets shoulder. "I'll take care of this," he said.

"Hold on," said Stamets. He hunched down slightly, craning his neck so he was level with Mischkelovitz's downturned face. "We won't let that happen. Will we, Hugh?"

For a moment, Culber thought it was an empty consolation, but then he realized what Stamets meant. The color drained from Culber's face but he plastered on a smile. "That's right, we won't. Everything's gonna be fine... Mischka. One jump." His eyes were unsteady as he locked his gaze with Stamets.

"One jump," said Stamets.

* * *

Lorca found Stamets in the shuttle bay staring out at the view of the planet Pahvo and its lovely reddish-hued star through the bay's forcefield. "They wanted to give me a medal," Lorca said as he took up a position next to Stamets. "For... leading the mission, saving Pahvo. If you can believe the irony." He looked at Stamets, unable to contain the smile on his face. Lorca still preferred stars to planets, but Pahvo was not just any planet, it was a planet that continued to exist because they had saved it.

In a sense, saving Pahvo had also saved Starfleet because saving Pahvo meant upholding the virtues upon which Starfleet and the Federation were founded. Virtues Admiral Terral had been willing to throw away. Virtues which were also something Stamets and Lorca now realized they had in common: that spirit of exploration, that desire to display the sort of upstanding character that compelled you to rush to the defense of the weak. Uniting disparate skills and species into a whole that was universes better than the sum of its parts.

The smile on Lorca's face held a genuine paternal affection. "I told them to give it to you."

"That's, um..." Stamets blinked. "Not necessary, sir."

"You made the jumps, you risked everything. None of it would have been possible without you. You did so well, the Klingons are on their way, hell-bent on revenge. I wish we could stay and fight, but Starfleet wants us back at Starbase 46."

"Do you need me to jump?"

"No," said Lorca, shaking his head, "I would never ask that of you. You've done enough. We'll warp to Starbase 46. We'll be fine."

"But—the Klingons—" Stamets seemed almost to stammer a moment. "I'll do one more jump to get the crew back to safety. They've risked enough already."

"If you're sure," said Lorca, and Stamets nodded. "Thank you." He looked back out at Pahvo then. "We're gonna win this war on account of you, Mr. Stamets. After this, it's a whole new chapter for Discovery. You've opened a door to a whole new era of exploration. The data provided by the micro-jumps will push us closer than we've ever been before to understanding the mysteries of the universe—"

"No, captain," said Stamets. "I mean _only_ one more jump. After we get back, I'm done."

Lorca stared. This was not happening. He had thought Culber to be the sole barrier to their continued use of the spore drive, that Stamets' passion for his work outweighed everything else in his life, the way Lorca's thirst for the stars did. He realized mushrooms were not the thing Stamets loved most. He had misjudged the astromycologist.

Stamets mistook Lorca's look for a personal judgment and tried to explain himself. "Traveling the mycelial network is like comingling the most abstruse blips of our celestial existence. I've seen these stars through a lens no one else has access to, and that has to be enough for me. Because I need Starfleet's best doctors to examine my condition and figure out what's been happening to me."

There was tremendous fear in Stamets' expression. The idea that something was happening to him outside of his control was terrifying.

First Landry, then Ripper, now Stamets. Lorca's monsters were vanishing one by one.

Of course, Stamets was more than a monster. He had been a human first. He seemed to desire to return to this state now. Lorca turned to Stamets, smiled. "One last jump, then. You have served the Federation honorably, lieutenant."

"Well, I'll always have you to thank for the view."

"Hm!" went Lorca, surprised by the sentiment. "You ready?"

As they walked towards the shuttle bay doors, Lorca kept his face as level as possible. Stamets was a crucial part of what made Discovery so important and what made Lorca himself so effective. If Stamets was gone, he would be without the leverage he needed to stave off the forces seeking to strip him of his command.

One jump. He was only going to get one more jump. Everything depending on what was on the other end of that jump. If they docked at that starbase, Stamets would walk away potentially forever, Terral and Cornwell would take Discovery, and Lorca did not know where his place was in this universe without the ship.

No, he realized, without Discovery, he had no place here at all. He knew it as surely as he knew the stars were shining and space was largely empty and black.

They reached the junction where Stamets went right and Lorca left. Lorca extended his hand. "See you on the other side."

Stamets shook Lorca's hand and smiled. So many times in the past they had been momentarily on the same page and then slipped right off and ended up odds with one another. Stamets was gratified to think they were ending this journey on the same page at last. "Thank you again, captain."

"No, thank you," said Lorca, and Stamets could tell Lorca meant it.

As they headed their separate ways, Stamets suddenly paused, turned back, and said, "Captain? I know it's not really my place, but... Dr. Mischkelovitz came into sickbay crying? Maybe you should, I dunno, check on her?"

"I will," said Lorca.

* * *

He had to act fast. The timer was still running and it was fast approaching zero hour. Absent time, he needed more space. Mischkelovitz was still in sickbay, sharing a cup of hot tea with Culber, apparently calm enough for a regular conversation now. She and Culber were even laughing, though Lorca immediately noticed her laughter was an attempt at polite reinforcement and not at all genuine.

All he had do was say her name and beckon to her and she put down her tea and trotted after him obediently.

"I cried," she said when they were in the hall, as if the red, puffy state of her eyes were not proof enough.

"We have a problem," said Lorca, glancing to make sure the corridor was deserted. "I just received word from Terral. Now that the cloak is solved, they don't need you on Discovery, so they're gonna send you back to some laboratory behind the lines and make you work on someone else's projects. Unless we can give them a reason to keep you here."

Mischkelovitz's eyes went wide. Leave Discovery? Discovery was her home. There was no captain that would have her but Lorca, and for reasons that went deeper than anything Lorca could ever know, she did not want to be anywhere but on a starship.

"We need to give them proof that your map is real." Lorca swallowed. Everything depended on how she took this next piece of information. "Particular resonance targeting," he said in a way that made it feel like he had spoken those exact words before. He removed something from his pocket. It was shiny and gold. "Can you get me the resonance coordinates for this?"

It was an insignia, but not one she recognized. At its center lay a circle of red and black patterned to resemble the continents of a planet. A sword stabbed through the planet, and two smooth, wing-like protrusions reminded her of the Starfleet insignia turned upside-down.

He let her take it, his fingers shaking faintly as she did, because he had not let anyone else touch it, much less see it, in two years. She turned it over and gasped at the inscription on the back.

"It's proof, Mischka," he said. "At least, I think it is. That's why I had to get Burnham. To make sure."

The letters on the back were as plain as day: BURNHAM. MICHAEL. A service number which was not Starfleet in origin.

"The thing is, they'll never believe me unless we can show them, without any doubt, that you're right, and I'm right. Even with this algorithm, we are still outnumbered and outgunned against the Klingons, but maybe we can fix that if we can find more guns and more people. So tell me, right now, can you provide me with the origin of wherever this came from?"

"I need a few days, but... yes."

Lorca's face fell. This was not a time problem that could be solved with one hundred and thirty-three jumps, not when he only had the one. He would have to take Discovery on the universe's most insane "evasive maneuvers" to buy her that much time. That was not likely to fool anyone for very long.

Finding Lorca absent any elation, Mischkelovitz asked, "You need it sooner?"

"I need it now," he admitted.

"Then let's go," she said, and started off the hallway, taking the lead for once.

"Put it in your pocket," Lorca told her, falling into step beside her.

O'Malley noticed her puffy eyes on her return, of course, and started to try and engage her, but Mischkelovitz held up a hand. "Wait here," she said to them both, and stepped into the lab.

The door closed. They waited.

Forty seconds later, Mischkelovitz emerged again, strangely very calm. "Okay," she said to Lorca. "You can come in now."

The insignia was on the worktable. The mycelial map floated above, but it looked different now. There were two maps overlaid on one another, half a centimeter apart. There was no sign of Lalana, thank goodness. Lorca picked up the mysterious insignia and slid it into his pocket as he stared at the map.

"You're a miracle worker," he told Mischkelovitz.

"No," she said, "I'm a hard worker and a smart worker. Miracles are for fools."

However she wanted to describe it, it was a miracle. He reached up and encrypted the second map under a personal command code, FKECG.

"This probably goes without saying, but not a word of this to anyone. Promise me. This stays between us and the higher-ups at Starfleet Command when we brief them, all right?"

"Yes, captain."

Honestly, she had her own reasons for not wanting anyone to know what she had just done.

* * *

"Captain, there was a strange data surge from Lab 26," said Saru when Lorca stepped onto the bridge. Lorca wondered exactly how much processing power Mischkelovitz had siphoned from the ship's data centers to get the results as fast as she had.

"We'll look into it after we arrive safe and sound," said Lorca, and went to the captain's chair.

In the engineering lab, Culber looked at the spore drive chamber, features clouded with worry. He heard footsteps and turned. Stamets strode straight up to Culber, cupped his hands against Culber's face and kissed him with a fervent passion. It was a kiss that lingered and broke only when Lorca's voice came over the comms.

"Mr. Stamets? Shall we dock this weary vessel?"

"Yes, Captain," said Stamets, gazing at Culber with adoration. He could see Culber's reluctance, the fear. "There is a moon near Starbase 46 and I understand they have the most esteemed Kasseelian opera house where they are currently performing _La bohème_. I could be your date."

Stamets had always hated opera, but he loved Culber so much more. His love for Culber was the single greatest force in his version of the universe. Culber's face broke into a smile. "Are you saying you'll actually sit through that with me?"

"Just this jump," said Stamets earnestly, "and then I'm going to have a lot of free time on my hands."

Culber reached up, drew his hand across Stamets' cheek, and then let Stamets go. Stamets entered the spore chamber, smiling. At the drive controls, Tilly initiated the spore release.

On the bridge, Lorca looked at the viewscreen at the stars. If he did this, there was no going back from it, but then, there was no going back now anyway. Lorca brought up the encrypted command override of the navigational controls on the console in the armrest of his chair. His fingers danced across the keypad. F-K-E-C-G.

"Let's go home," he said.

The spores swirled about the spore chamber, a cloud of pale blue dust, and still Stamets was smiling at Culber.

Then he screamed. Everything on the ship began to flash as the power systems fluctuated far beyond the capacity of the regulators to compensate. The ship shuddered. The force of it drove Culber back against Tilly's console on the opposite side of the room from Stamets. Crystals of ice formed on the surface of the spore chamber.

A moment later, all was still. The lights returned.

"Talk to me, cadet," said Lorca.

Tilly's voice was a panic. "The computer is reading it as an incomplete navigational sequence!"

Stamets staggered out of the spore drive and collapsed onto the floor. Culber and Tilly rushed to his side. Culber rolled Stamets over. Stamets convulsed, his eyes closed.

"He's crashing," said Culber, voice small and desperate. "I'm detecting white matter hyperintensity." Stamets' eyes popped open. They were suddenly pale, the blue obscured behind a cloud of milky white.

"What's wrong with him?" asked Tilly. As Culber's voice had shrunk, hers had risen in panicked alarm. "What's happening to his eyes?"

Stamets spoke. "So many... I can see them all! Infinite permutations. It's... magnificent!" His eyes twitched back and forth.

"Paul? Paul?" Culber called out, but Stamets did not respond.


	74. Now Darkness Falls

A/N: Takes place during episode 10, "Despite Yourself." I apologize to those of you who have not seen the entire show but are still reading this. This may feel like having the rug pulled out from under you. (There's 2-4 of you out there, I know.) Those of you who have watched the show may also feel the same about certain details. All I can say is, I don't take the trust you've placed in me by reading this far lightly, and while we are absolutely nearing the end, the story is far from over. The things you seek, they shall be found.

The last scene in this chapter was one that was written months—months!—ago that I was desperately trying to reach before the show did the reveal. If you had told me it would take this long to get here... I still wouldn't change a word. It turns out, all these words are important.

Final note, if you read the previous chapter in the first 8-ish hours after it was first posted, there was a necessary bit of conversation I realized I forgot to throw in. Ctrl-F "box" in the previous chapter to find it.

* * *

They had suffered minor structural damage but Discovery was intact, all decks and departments reporting. Lorca rose from the captain's chair and approached the flickering display of the viewscreen. The stars beyond were beautiful specks of light floating in a sea of black tinged with clouds of blue and purple interstellar gases. Between Discovery and the distant stars lay a field of ship debris.

"Mr. Saru?" demanded Lorca. "What am I looking at?"

Saru shook his head, not understanding. "I, uh, I'm not quite sure. I'm unable to confirm our position using standard procedures. Sensors are going haywire!"

"Where is our starbase?" mused Lorca.

"Not where it should be," managed Saru.

The ship debris around them was Klingon, but the hull densities were wrong. Saru reported the navigational array was malfunctioning. They appeared to be at their intended coordinates based on stellar cartography, but nothing else was where it should have been. The spore drive was offline because its navigator was presently laying on the floor of the engineering bay, unresponsive.

A Vulcan cruiser appeared on their sensors. Rather than answer their hails, it fired on them, raising even more questions. As the Vulcans came about for a second strafing run, Discovery prepared to fire in response, but another volley of fire smashed against the Vulcan's hull from the side. It was another ship, the Cooper, and another mystery: the Cooper was supposed to be undergoing a refit after sustaining crippling damage in a battle three days earlier.

The voice on the other end of the communication channel was unfamiliar. "Spooked by rebels, Discovery? You're losing your edge. Don't worry, we'll take care of them. Cooper out."

"Vulcan rebels?" asked Burnham, verbalizing the question on the minds of the bridge crew. "Firing on Starfleet?"

"I may have something," said Saru at last. "The quantum signature of the Cooper, as well as that of the Vulcan cruiser, are inconsistent with ours."

"That's not possible," said Burnham. "All matter native to our universe resonates with the same quantum signature, nothing can change it."

"That's true," said Lorca. "Unless..." He paced towards the viewscreen, turning to address the whole of the bridge. "...This is not our universe."

"That is not possible," said Burnham again, but her protest fell far short the second time around.

* * *

He brought Saru and Burnham into his ready room and presented them with the original finished map and the proposition of a parallel universe. Burnham quickly realized the significance and summarized the mycelial network as it truly was: "A vast system underpinning all quantum realities."

"But the exact coordinates of some of the more esoteric destinations eluded us," said Lorca. "Apparently the hundred and thirty-three jumps we made filled in the gaps."

"An extraordinarily fortunate coincidence," said Saru, in a way that suggested he had a glimmer of something beyond coincidence.

"I'd say _un_ fortunate, wouldn't you, number one?" asked Lorca sharply.

Burnham immediately realized they were not going to be able to deliver the cloak-breaking algorithm Starfleet was waiting for.

"That's why we have to make it back," said Lorca. "Otherwise the war's as good as lost."

"Well, Stamets, brought us here accidentally, so we should examine the spore drive's navigational logs more closely—"

"I just pushed Stamets too hard, the number of jumps scrambled his ability to hold the coordinates for Starbase 46 in his head," explained Lorca. "Now what we need to do is understand where we are and how to survive, and then we'll find a way home." He looked at Burnham and Saru, a silent plea in his eyes. "Recalibrate the sensors and you start looking at the records, see if there's something we can learn."

"Yes, captain," said Burnham.

Saru and Burnham hastened to carry out his orders and Lorca checked the Lab 26 security feed. Empty, but the computer said Mischkelovitz was in there. She had probably startled at the jump gone awry and hidden herself in the wall. "Lorca to Mischkelovitz." There was no answer. He looked at the communications display. The channel was open. "You there?"

"Yes," came the tentative answer.

Lorca's tone was grave but calm and patient. "Mischka, we have a problem."

"That jump wasn't right," she said.

"No, it was not. The coordinates of that universe we were going to use as proof? Somehow they overwrote the default coordinates."

He heard the faintest whimper. "Then..."

"Either I did something wrong when I encrypted it, or..." A pause, then a dramatic and portentous inhalation. "Whatever you did to get those coordinates so quickly."

She gasped and covered her mouth. One tiny slip-up with the computer and it was entirely possible she had done just that. She could certainly believe it. If anyone found out how she had gotten those coordinates...

Lorca suspected there were tears on her face. In the same even, reassuring tone he had been employing since this call began, he said, "Don't worry. I overwrote the coordinate system with the original settings. No one will ever find out it was you. I'll take the blame before I let that happen."

"Thank you, captain," she said in a tiny, delicate voice. Lorca smiled faintly at the empty air.

"We'll get through this, Mischka. Don't you worry. One step at a time."

He closed the channel and glanced at the bowl of fortune cookies, pulling one out. _You are careful and systematic in your business arrangements_. Whether or not it was a proper fortune was up for debate, but there was no doubting the fact it was true. He looked out the ready room window at the stars. Cornwell and Terral were a universe away and he still had the view.

* * *

They found a data core in the debris field surrounded by the bodies of Klingons, Vulcans, and Andorians. All three species had apparently been together on the Klingons' destroyed ship. The reason soon became clear. In this universe, there was no Starfleet. There was no United Federation of Planets. The whole of the known galaxy was controlled by a single entity, and there were only two key forces at play within it: humans, and everyone else.

It was called the Terran Empire. There were a thousand worlds and species subjugated under its rule. It was the antithesis of the Federation in every way. Xenophobic, warlike, oppressive. An entire galactic culture based on the unconditional hatred and rejection of anything non-human. At its center ruled a nameless, faceless emperor with an unparalleled reputation for savagery. Against this fascist, monopolistic threat, a handful of alien races fought in a feeble but enduring rebellion.

The data core contained a vast quantity of stolen caches of information on the Terrans: their weapons, their power, their personnel. Personnel that had the same names and faces as people aboard Discover. It proved conclusively they were in an alternate version of their universe—one where they could literally meet an alternate version of themselves. It was like gazing through a dark mirror.

As Lorca listened to this summation, he marveled at how foreign it felt. "No way we're asking these neighbors for a cup of sugar," he quipped.

Then the Cooper returned from its hunt and hailed them again, sending the bridge into a small frenzy as they tried to figure out exactly how to respond. "What intel do we have!" Lorca demanded. They had only just begun to brush the surface of the data in that core.

Saru hastily provided a key point of information: "The rebel logs show their ships being attacked by a vessel with a warp signature matching our Discovery, but a quantum signature matching this universe. That signature seems to have vanished at the same coordinates where we popped in. It is possible we switched places with their Discovery."

"I'm gonna run with Mr. Saru's theory and hope that we don't run into ourselves and blow our cover," announced Lorca. Burnham quickly modified their ship's signature with the deflector to match the signature of the Discovery that was supposed to be in this region of space.

This took precious time. The Cooper began to get impatient. "They're saying if we don't respond that we should prepare to be fired on," reported Bryce at the comms.

"Open a channel, audio only," said Lorca.

"Belay that," said Burnham. "I'm sorry, but you can't take it, sir. I'm examining the crew manifest of mirror Discovery, you're not its captain."

"Who is?" asked Lorca.

Burnham put the image up on the main viewscreen. It was Sylvia Tilly. Not as they knew her, with the frizzy red hair and the quick smile. Clad in golden armor and with straight, blonde hair. Her image stared across the bridge with a ferocious intensity.

"Uh, that's me," said Tilly helpfully. "That's me!" And yet, in almost every way that counted, it clearly was not.

"That's absurd," said Lorca, summing up this turn of events perfectly. "Cadet, looks like you're taking this." He spun the captain's chair towards Tilly.

"Uh, wh... uh, wh-what—what do I say?" stammered Tilly as she sat down, immediately panicking.

There was no way Tilly was doing this without help. Lorca fixed his full attention on her with an intensity that drew her attention to him in kind. Despite his annoyance at this turn of events, he was calm and firm as he instructed her on what to do. "You just get rid of them as fast as possible and you talk as little as possible."

Tilly looked up at him from the chair fearfully. "That—that might be a little hard. Have you noticed that I talk a lot?"

"Defy your every instinct," said Lorca.

They opened the channel.

For a moment, Tilly just looked around the bridge. Then: "Hello, this is Captain Tilly. What the heck—h-hell? Hold your horses!" She looked at Lorca apologetically.

"Why the delay in responding, Discovery?" asked the Cooper.

"I was..." Tilly kept her eyes focused on Lorca. He tried signaling her, mouthing at her. "...Indisposed."

Everything that was coming out of her mouth was wrong. Lorca marveled at it as much as he scowled.

"Any reason you're still hanging around?" asked the Cooper.

"We're experiencing mechanical issues," managed Tilly. Lorca nodded at her in encouragement.

"Need a hand? We're not far."

Lorca signaled her as clearly as he could without making a sound: _No!_ But Tilly was flustered and did not answer quickly enough to stave off the Cooper's next question:

"And why are you not on screen!?"

"M-Mechanical issues?" she asked, and looked pleadingly at Lorca. "Here's my chief engineer."

Burnham rushed over and touched Lorca's back. "I don't know who you are over here just yet," she warned, "so conceal your voice just in case."

It was hard to be too angry at Tilly for failing to come across as a captain because Lorca made a lousy engineer. "How you doing, captain?" Lorca asked, finding himself mimicking a Scottish accent. "Everything's squared away here. We've got, uh, wee bit of trouble with our visual emitters and the starboard nacelle, but a bit of tweaking, we'll be good to go, all right?"

Despite the fact this was the worst engineering jargon possible since the beginning of time, the captain of the Cooper apparently knew as much about engineering as Lorca did. It worked.

"Happy hunting. Long live the Empire!"

Lorca mouthed at Tilly: _Long live!_

"Long live the Empire!" blurted Tilly. Lorca reached over and closed the comm via the armrest console.

"Good," he said simply, forgiving even, though that had been almost entirely awful. It took Tilly a moment, but she got out of his chair. Lorca addressed the bridge. "Next time, we might not get away with audio only. If we want to live to get back home, we have to make it so we look and act like we belong here. Mr. Saru, while we get up to speed with universe, see to it that this ship, its crew, it's captain"—he looked at Tilly—"are prepared."

"Yes, sir," said Saru.

Lorca looked at Tilly and only Tilly. "I mean _fully_ prepared."

Tilly still looked startled as a deer in the headlights, but now that they all knew what they were walking into, next time would go better. It had to. This was not the sort of universe that would easily forgive mistakes.

* * *

Burnham was assigned the task of unraveling everyone's mirror identities from the files in the data core. It was not necessary for her to brief every member of the crew directly, but some figures were of key note in this universe and merited personal attention. She found herself standing in the hallway before the assembled personnel of Lab 26: O'Malley, Mischkelovitz, Groves, Larsson, and Allan. "Colonel O'Malley. You are an interrogator in the service of the Emperor," she announced, transferring the details of O'Malley's mirror identity to his padd.

"Whizz-bang," said O'Malley, annoyed as he skimmed the top of the file. He doubted "interrogator" entailed the same methodology he applied in their universe. One thing was for certain: his mirror counterpart had just as many freckles. The other O'Malley looked grim and intimidating in his black uniform in the file photo. As much as O'Malley knew it was his own face, he had real trouble recognizing it.

Burnham turned to go. "What about us?" asked Groves.

"I'm only delivering priority one identity information," said Burnham. This was the designation they had given to "people they might encounter who held substantial Terran rank or played a significant role in Terran government."

"Really?" said Groves. The word could have been pejorative, but coming from Groves, it sounded more mildly bored than anything else. "After all those games of chess we played, this is the thanks I get?"

That gave Burnham pause. "You're Rove," she realized.

"In the flesh," said Groves. "Which is why I find it hard to believe that I'm not a priority one person." O'Malley rolled his eyes at that, but since everyone was facing Burnham, she was the only one who saw it.

Burnham glanced at the padd in her hand. "Lieutenant Larsson, you were aboard the Buran when it was destroyed in this universe."

Larsson barely reacted. "Ah," he said, as if this were no particular surprise. "We must not have met the lului, so I never wrote my book. Then I would have been on the Buran." It was strange to think that this held true in their universe as well: if they had not met the lului, he would have died on the Buran there, too.

Burnham wondered what "the lului" were, but she had enough mysteries on her plate for the moment. "Unfortunately, I was unable to—"

Groves pointed to himself, then Mischkelovitz. "John Francis Narvic, Emellia Petrellovitz." He spelled the surnames for her.

Burnham checked again. She found them both in the same file. "John Narvic died in 2238 at a research colony in the Mizar sector called 'Qorya.'" She mispronounced it, as people did when seeing the word for the first time.

"Damn," said Groves. "Really? Afterlife fist bump?" He offered a fist to Larsson. Larsson only glowered at him. They were roommates, not friends.

Burnham turned to Mischkelovitz and addressed her with an entirely more measured approach. "Doctor, you were... senior science officer aboard the Buran."

Mischkelovitz blinked. "I was... I was a bridge officer? On the Buran? With Captain Lorca? I was the captain's science officer? I was..." She suddenly looked so happy. "I was a bridge officer! And then, did I die?" Her voice was a happy exclamation. Even the prospect of her own demise seemed unable to diminish her glee at this information.

Burnham glanced down and discovered a small surprise. "No, you are currently in prison for treason."

"I'm Gabriel's senior science officer! Me!" She looked at Groves and O'Malley for affirmation. Groves shrugged, not caring because he was dead, but O'Malley managed a weak smile of dubious support.

"I'm... glad for you," said Burnham stoically, because she did not know what you were supposed to say when someone reacted to this sort of information with the level of unrestrained joy Mischkelovitz was displaying. Burnham looked at Allan. "Do you also have another name?"

"Me?" said Allan, surprised. "No. Just 'John Langley Allan.' Same as it's ever been."

"I was unable to find any record of you or your parents. It's possible you were never born."

"Oh, well that's comforting," said Allan. "A whole universe of evil and I'm the only one not in it."

Burnham tilted her head, trying to determine if that was sarcasm. "Major?"

"I'm too good for this universe. Literally too good for it!" He grinned at Mischkelovitz and she pressed her hands together and smiled back coyly, fighting the urge to laugh.

Burnham sighed. At least two people could find positives in this abysmal situation. "The rest of you will need to lay low to avoid causing suspicion." She turned to leave again.

"Wait!" said Mischkelovitz. "What about Mischka?"

O'Malley reacted to this request with alarm. Groves seemed piqued. "Milosz Mieszała," Groves supplied.

"I'm not sure," O'Malley began to say, but Burnham had already located the record without even needing to ask Groves how Milosz's name was spelled.

"He also died in 2238."

Mischkelovitz was immediately grief-stricken. She turned and pressed her face against O'Malley's shoulder and he put an arm around her in sympathy, but truthfully he was relieved. As tragic as that information was, it was better than having Mischkelovitz attempting to chase down Milosz's living ghost somewhere in this universe.

"What the hell happened in 2238?" wondered Groves aloud.

"I don't have any information about that," lied Burnham. The answer was plainly written on the padd in her hand. In 2238, at the age of fifteen, Emellia Petrellovitz had killed eighteen people, ten of them children. Listed among the dead were John Francis Narvic and Mischkelovitz's former husband in the other universe, Milosz Mieszała.

* * *

Lorca stood in his ready room doing his own delve into the core data. The bridge now belonged to "Captain Killy" as far as he was concerned (what a nickname that was; Tilly's mirror counterpart had really gone out of her way to earn it), but it suited him fine, because he liked the quiet dimness of his ready room.

As soon as Burnham appeared, Lorca began to pepper her with questions. "Are we civilians? Do we get uniforms? What?"

The answer was not pleasant. Neither he nor Burnham were presently part of the Terran command ecosystem. Burnham was presumed dead and Lorca was wanted for her murder.

Lorca swallowed. "Well, what happened?"

"It appears that you and I both enjoyed immense prestige here. I was the captain of the Shenzhou. And you had the Buran here, too, sir."

Lorca asked the question because it had to be asked, but his reluctance was clear. "And, my crew—they alive?"

"No," said Burnham. "You attempted a coup against the emperor. I was sent to stop you. In the process, my shuttle was destroyed by one of your followers and I was killed. And the emperor laid waste to your ship in retaliation. It's believed you escaped."

Lorca shook his head. That was not right, not at all. "Well, there's me hoping I'd find a better version of myself over here," he said, and smiled in thanks at Burnham. Then he turned to the window. "Look out there. Come on." He jerked his head for her to join him at the window and she obliged. Their reflections stood side by side against the backdrop of stars. "Amazing, isn't it? Different universe, but somehow the same people had a way to find each other." He looked away from the stars a moment, smiled at her. "The strongest argument I've ever seen for the existence of destiny."

"I'm not sure if I believe in destiny," said Burnham.

"Well, is that so?" asked Lorca. "Sitting in that cell all alone, facing a life sentence of solitude, future full of misery... A little part of you had to know that wasn't the end of your story. You were destined for something more."

"Destiny didn't get me out of prison, captain," she countered, and for a moment he felt every bit of that cold, Vulcan upbringing. Then her voice broke into something warmer. "You did that."

"Well. Let's agree to disagree. For now." He looked at Burnham, her eyes fixed on the stars. "Maybe it's not a bad thing that you and I are ghosts. I found something curious in the data here. A potential way home. I didn't know how to exploit it till right now, but I think you might end up saving us all."

According to rebel files, theirs was not the first ship from their universe to end up here. The USS Defiant, a Constitution-class, had slipped into this universe as well. The difference was, it had not done so with a spore drive. That meant there was another way to traverse between the worlds.

As they reviewed the data and formulated a plan, Lorca handed Burnham a cookie. "You have a reputation for being straightforward and honest," it read.

He also took one for himself. "Your principles mean more to you than any money or success." He snorted in laughter.

"Is that funny?" asked Burnham, who tended to miss jokes because of her childhood on Vulcan.

"The last person who got this fortune hated it," Lorca recalled. "But I like it just fine." He smiled and tucked it into his pocket.

Ultimately, their plan was elegantly simple. Posing as their Terran counterparts, Burnham—whose body had never been found—would bring in the Empire's most wanted fugitive, Gabriel Lorca, and gain access to the Shenzhou. From there, they would download every bit of data available on the Defiant, and finally return to Discovery and figure out how to apply this information towards their situation. A simple mission, in and out. Tyler would pose as Burnham's personal guard for an added level of backup security.

"Let's get us home," Lorca said.

First, though, they were all going to need a very good night's sleep.

* * *

The message came through brig chess and it was two words: "NEED SPORES." Tilly looked at it and frowned and bit her lip.

She should have been reviewing her own personnel file, or better yet, sleeping, but the vicious achievements of her mirror counterpart, "Captain Killy," scared her and she was too jumpy to sleep. Instead, she was in the engineering bay, trying to pinpoint the source of the aberration that had dropped them into another universe. Other people were hard at work on the problem, too, and likely the answer was simply what everyone suspected—the enduring toll jumping had taken on Stamets—but Tilly had been the one actively at the controls. She kept going over everything in her head. Where had they gone wrong? Could she have done something to prevent this? How were they going to get home?

There was no way she would solve these questions tonight, but working on a technical problem was a comfort to the engineering portion of her brain.

The two-word message concerned her. It was possible this entire thing had not been Stamets fault at all. Possibly it was hers because she had been supplying Mischkelovitz with spores.

Well, she decided. No time like the present to practice being captain. She headed towards the lab.

"Oh my god," said O'Malley when he saw her. She looked the very image of her mirror counterpart. Gold armor over a black uniform, long blonde hair flowing straight down to her shoulders instead of the familiar mess of red frizz. He was in a Terran uniform, too, but his had black armor instead of gold, so was much less showy, and his hair had not changed.

O'Malley's response threw Tilly, but she quickly recovered. "Is that how you address your captain!"

O'Malley stared at her, blinking in disbelief.

Tilly shrunk apologetically. "Sorry," she said. "Practicing being the scary version of me!" She threw her hands up in a display of helplessness.

"No, that was... good," said O'Malley. "You just look so..."

The expression on O'Malley's face did not seem very appreciative of the new look. Tilly self-consciously pulled at her straightened hair. "You don't like it?"

"I realize it's bad form to tell a woman she doesn't look good, but..." He frowned. He was clearly thinking it.

"Really? It's not sexy?" O'Malley's eyebrows shot up. Realizing how that sounded, Tilly immediately blurted, "Not that I meant—I mean—"

"Me neither!" exclaimed O'Malley. "Not that you're not—" They were both getting entirely flustered. "I'm much too old for you! And married!"

Tilly held up her hands again, this time pointing upward and spinning her index fingers in a request to pause the conversation. "Let's rewind and start over!"

O'Malley squinted at her because he did not believe in do-overs. "I just meant, I think you look perfectly fine as yourself, and this is..." He waved his hand at her look. "A lot."

"I don't want you to think I'm sexy," said Tilly, embarrassed. "You're very nice, colonel, but..." She shook her head. That thought had never entered her head until now and it held no appeal.

O'Malley turned his gaze to the ceiling and sighed, partly because no one liked being rejected no matter how many times it happened or how right the rejection was, and partly because Tilly was rather young and probably lacked some awareness as to what qualities she had to offer in this regard. "The sexiest thing a person can be is themselves," he declared. "And everyone's most attractive feature is their mind. Now let's call this topic closed forever."

"Forever," agreed Tilly.

Inside, Mischkelovitz was also surprised by Tilly's new appearance, but made no attempt to comment on it. Her own Terran uniform (they all had them in case of some sort of unfortunate Terran incursion) lay draped halfway across a table on the far side of the room, essentially abandoned.

"Where are the spores?" was Mischkelovitz's greeting. She had not really warmed up to Tilly despite the regular spore deliveries.

"I need you to tell me what you're doing with them," said Tilly.

Mischkelovitz shook her head forcefully enough it seemed to make her dizzy and bumped into her worktable. "I can't!"

Tilly took a breath and focused herself. "I've been bringing you spores for weeks now, and that last jump we ended up in parallel universe. How do I know that wasn't because of the spores I gave you?"

Mischkelovitz recalled what Lorca had said. You had to find the truth in what you were saying. The truth was, Mischkelovitz knew how they had gotten here, but that was a secret. It was also true she knew her work with the spores was entirely not the cause of it. Not everything you could do with spores involved traveling places. "I promise you," said Mischkelovitz, "it wasn't that. I need spores, though, I really do. Please." Her eyes began to water.

Tilly hated to see anyone cry. She knew too well what it felt like. "Why is it so important? Why can't you tell anyone?"

"Because," trembled Mischkelovitz, "it's Mischka's secret!" Her breathing became erratic.

"You mean... Lieutenant Mischkelovitz? Your..." Thankfully, Mischkelovitz nodded, erasing the need for Tilly to probe for further confirmation. "But he didn't work with spores. I've read every single thing I could find about his research, and he never..." Milosz had not worked with spores or mushrooms, he had no interest in biology, and would have found Stamets' physics-as-biology assertions impossibly simpleminded and pedestrian, but he had worked with things that could possibly interact with spores that had the properties belonging to _Prototaxites stellaviatori_.

Tilly spoke aloud what she thought Mischkelovitz was doing. The way Mischkelovitz's eyes went wide was answer enough. "But that could totally have affected the jump!" exclaimed Tilly.

"No!" insisted Mischkelovitz. "It couldn't, because look!" She ran to the nearest wall and began pulling open the panels. Every element of the walls was a panel, and behind every panel were transparent conduits. A thin line of blue dust lay in the bottom of the conduits, but they were otherwise empty. "It was like this before the jump!"

"Then you already..." Tilly's eyes widened. "Did it work?"

"Yes!"

"Really?"

" _Yes!_ "

Tilly accepted that, if Mischkelovitz was telling her the truth, there really was no way Mischkelovitz's work had interfered with the spore jump. At least that meant Tilly's conscience was now a little clearer. Her secret spore deliveries had not been the cause of this mess. Which did not absolve her of any responsibility from being the one at the drive's controls.

"So will you get me more spores?"

Tilly's brow knit as she frowned in thought. "Okay," she decided. "But I can't do it right now. The lab is under a lot of scrutiny because of what happened."

"So what? Aren't you the captain now?" asked Mischkelovitz. Tilly stared. Surely Mischkelovitz did not think this play-acting was indicative of any actual change in rank. "I'm a bridge officer, you know. On the Buran. Maybe I should just go and—"

"No!" Tilly said quickly. "I promise I'll bring more spores soon. Just hang tight until I do. Promise me you won't try to get any yourself."

As displeased as Mischkelovitz was to have to wait, she agreed. "But listen to me, you can't tell anyone what I'm working on, understand? Not a single person. If word gets back to anyone..."

"I understand," said Tilly, even though she did not. Science was better when people were working together in her opinion, not territorially hiding their work.

It struck Tilly as she was standing in the access chamber, preparing to open the outer door. They might never get out of this strange universe. Exactly who was Mischkelovitz worried word would get back to?

* * *

As Lorca entered his quarters, his mind was already pouring a drink.

"Gabriel."

He almost jumped out of his boots in surprise. Lalana was sitting in the middle of the room waiting for him. He hastily shut the door before anyone saw her, never mind that the hallway outside was empty. "Lalana, what... How?"

She tilted her head and spun her hands. "How do I usually get into your room?"

In the past, he knew the answer to that question had been Einar Larsson, but that could not be the answer now. Larsson did not have full security clearance aboard Discovery and the door to Lorca's quarters, like the door to his study, had been set to unlock only for him.

"Did you forget?" she asked. "You gave me your room codes many years ago. 'Fate has shown you what you were not to see.'"

That was indeed the code. It had been transferred along with every other personal setting on file from the Buran. It was also the code to his personal study. There was a more pressing concern. "Did anyone see you?"

"Of course not. I was very careful. Einar hid me in the halls." There was Larsson's participation, right on cue. Lorca was beginning to realize the two of them were thick as thieves.

He shook his head faintly in amazement. "All right, well, you're welcome to stay the night, but I'm dog-tired." He moved towards the bed, unfastening his collar and pulling open the front of his uniform jacket with a groan of exhaustion.

"Now that we are in this universe, do you still need the phaser under your pillow?"

"I'll put it somewhere else," he agreed.

He was agreeing to a request she had not made. "Oh, no, I do not mind it, I simply wondered if being here was comfort enough so as to render the phaser unnecessary."

Lalana seemed to have missed the memo on what "here" was like. "Why the hell would being here..." He rubbed his eyes. He was tired and not entirely sure how to phrase it.

"Because of San Francisco."

Lorca did not follow. He sighed, shook his head, and went for the whiskey. "I'm not in the mood for any riddles tonight," he warned her, pouring a glass. "Maybe you should go."

"In San Francisco, you kept reaching under your pillow and waking up when you could not find the thing that was missing. If I had known a phaser was the thing you were reaching for, I would have brought you one. As it was, I did not know how to help you and I find myself in that position again."

Lorca moved towards the window and stared out at the stars. "It's great that you want to help, but we've already got a plan to get us out of this universe, so unless you're hiding a clone of Stamets..." He turned from the window, smiling at her in jest.

Lalana did not click her tongue. She tilted her head. "I think you have heard the opposite of my meaning."

"Oh?" he prompted, sipping his drink and turning away from the window to listen.

"I am not interested in helping the crew get home, I am interested in helping you with your plan. You have one, do you not?"

She had proven herself an excellent sounding board on several occasions, so he explained the plan to gain access to the Shenzhou and steal intel on the Defiant.

She stopped him. "This is very interesting, but you cannot expect me to believe you came back here for the purposes of leaving again? Is it that you need to pick something up?"

For a moment, he was again confused, but then there was a glimmer in the back of his mind. He felt a sudden rush of something approaching panic. The surge of adrenaline kicked him wide awake. "What the hell are you talking about," he said flatly.

"The particles here, they match you in resonance. So we are in your home now, are we not?"

"This is..." He shook his head as if clearing it. This was not happening. "I'm from Earth, Lalana. You know that."

"Yes, but not the Earth my Gabriel was from. There must be an Earth here as well, then."

"Your..." She knew. She _knew_. How could she possibly know? She couldn't. "What are you saying?"

"What part of what I have said is confusing?"

He was still desperately trying to stick to the script. "All of it! Lalana, we're in a different universe, not the one we're from."

"My eyes see more than you will ever know. As I have said repeatedly to humans, and yet still you seem to have trouble understanding. Gabriel, I knew you weren't Hayliel the moment I saw you, because you are a different color."

Lorca sat down heavily on the bed and considered grabbing the phaser under his pillow. Not yet. Not until he understood what was going on. He downed the remaining whiskey in his glass and tried to return to the lie one more time. "You're confused, that's all. That jump must have messed up your eyes. Let's get Mischka to take a look."

"I even tested you, do you recall? I asked you what the last message Hayliel sent me was about, and you could not tell me, because you did not send it."

He dimly remembered that. "But..."

"Then there was the time you said we were not animals, when I brought you the octopus. My Hayliel understood very well that we are."

That incident he recalled vividly because a whole, live octopus from the San Francisco Bay was not an easy thing to forget.

Lalana continued, "When I was helping Dr. Li with her investigation, she shared with me the notes of the medical doctor who served with her uncle. He examined the body of a member of the Suliban Cabal. We have similar eyes, did you know? The Suliban were genetically enhanced with lului eyes because lului eyes can see particle resonances in waves outside of light."

Something clicked in his mind. He put the glass down on the bed next to him. "The halo of stars."

Her hands spun twice in approval. "Yes, I believe that is another aberrant resonance. But yours it not a halo. It is... darker somehow. That is why I call you the space between the stars. And now, we are in a world where everything is the space between the stars. So, this must be the world you are from. It matches you."

His heartbeat was pounding in his ears. "This entire time, you knew..." He could not finish the sentence and say what she knew because admitting it even after exposure still went against his every instinct.

"Of course. That is why I have been helping you." She had helped him, repeatedly. She had given him details and insights above and beyond, which had never made much sense at the time except she seemed to enjoy talking and telling him things. "Why do you think I told you my story?"

Lorca stared. He had thought she was just trying to comfort the person she knew as her Gabriel by retelling their story. Something to get him through the tragedy of losing a ship. Not as an instruction manual, but that was how he had used it, and apparently exactly as she intended.

It struck him, the truth. "You told me the story so I'd keep you around." Lorca pulled at his mouth with his hand. It was impossibly crazy to think this whole time she had been on his side and known exactly who he was. He felt himself shake faintly at the magnitude of it.

"But of course. I was surprised how readily you believed me. My Hayliel understood, as you have failed to, that I am constantly repurposing truths, yet you 'take me at face value' even though you cannot read my face. Perhaps you thought there were no liars like you in my universe. But mostly, Gabriel, I told it to you because you are always so afraid. It is written on you as clearly as words are in a book. It is etched into you. My Hayliel had fears, but they did not govern him the way they govern you. He found the way to escape them."

"I'm not afraid," Lorca said with a sneer, because in this universe, that was not something you admitted.

Her head tilted. "Aren't you? Aren't you terrified right now? And are you not running away?"

He stood firm—figuratively, because he was still sitting on the bed and was not sure his legs would hold if he did get up. "I'm not afraid of anything. And I don't _run_."

"You are not a very good liar."

That statement hung in the air long enough for Lorca's face to cloud with anger.

Lalana's head straightened. "It is as it is. You do not need to admit anything. I am here to admit things to you, Gabriel. You are not him, but you are. You are funny and clever and you come up with the most amazing plans. You inspire people, to your own ends, but you inspire them all the same, and make them better. You take command of the world around you and shape it to your will, just as he did. I appreciate how you have attempted to become Hayliel. It is like you ate him, which is a very lului thing to do. You did not let his death go to waste."

To call that sentiment alien was an understatement.

She took a step towards him. "Mostly, you are the only thing I have left of him. I would do anything to keep you safe and make you happy."

Lorca's face darkened at her approach. He had read the lului reports. He knew the damage she could do on a cellular level. He knew it firsthand, though damaging was not the way she had used that skill during the single night they had spent together. "What the hell are you doing?"

"I have been your ally all this time in my world, but now that we are in yours, I wish to know. How may I help? What is your plan?" She stepped towards him again.

Given the words she used to describe it, she must have realized what he had done to the Buran captained by her Lorca. He reached for the phaser then. Stretched back and grabbed it from its hiding place under his pillow quick as he could and pointed it right at her. "Stay back. I see exactly what you're doing. You're trying to trick me, get me to let my guard down so you can avenge your precious 'Hayliel.' Well, I'm not falling for it." His finger tightened on the trigger.

"Oh, Gabriel. Killing you will not bring him back. You are the closest thing to him I have. I would not sacrifice that for anything. That is why I have been helping you. Because I still love your face, and I will always love your face. But I do not know this world or how to help you here. So tell me. What do we do next?"

He lowered the phaser and took a deep breath. He understood what she meant entirely because he knew it was true. When you had lost the person you loved most in the universe, it meant everything to be able to see their face again, even as another person. He knew it because he had lived it himself. He stared at her, looking forlorn. "I can't."

"Yes, you can. I know you can tell me because Hayliel could do anything he set his mind to, and you are him from another universe. Let me help you, Gabriel, the way I helped him." She took the last step towards him and placed her tail upon his hand in comfort and pressed her chest against his knee in companionship. "I have kept your secret. You can trust me."

So he told her.


	75. The Truth Must Out

Lorca awoke to the comms chiming and, half-asleep, growled out an annoyed, "What!"

"Captain." It was Saru. "It is after 0800 hours."

The mission. Lorca sat up. "Push it an hour," he said, rubbing his eyes. A weight shifted beside him. He looked over at Lalana. She was watching him, as always, with giant green eyes.

"Good morning, Gabriel."

"That's the line you're going with?"

"We were up so late, I thought it would be best if you slept in."

Lorca groaned. So she had turned off his morning alarm intentionally. "Did you do this to him, too?"

"Yes, I did," said Lalana. "You and Hayliel both run yourselves into the ground when given the chance. Sometimes it is necessary to make you stop. Did you sleep well?"

"Yeah," he admitted, a little surprised himself.

"Good," she said, and pulled her tail out from under his pillow. Lorca blinked, looked down at his hand, then at the pillow. If that had been her tail, then where... He twisted around and saw the phaser on the table next to the bed.

Lalana watched him realize what had happened and rolled back on her haunches, clicking her tongue with amusement. He frowned at her then started to chuckle. "What was that line about jokes? Practical..."

"Practical and effective," said Lalana. "You really did listen well to our story."

"A lot depended on it." It was not just the story she told. The original Gabriel Lorca had mentioned Lalana several times in his personal logs. Many of the references had been oblique, but Lalana had filled in the gaps enough for him to connect the dots. "I couldn't exactly ask you to retell it. Would've tipped my hand."

"Nonsense, it is my favorite story. I am happy to tell it as many times as you like."

"Hm," he said in appreciation, and got up to get some coffee, shower, shave, and dress—not into the blue Starfleet uniform he had worn every day for almost a year now, but in the black pants, shirt, and leather coat he had selected for the mission. He might have just tossed the Starfleet uniform anywhere, but he folded the pants and jacket carefully onto the bed. The fortune from the previous day slipped partway out from the jacket pocket. He picked it up and smirked at the coincidence of it. No, not coincidence, something else.

"You look very nice," said Lalana.

"You think?" he said, slipping the fortune into his pocket anew and brushing a hand across the breast of the leather coat. "Lot more comfortable than that uniform."

Lalana shifted her color to black. Not just black, but a shade of black that seemed to absorb the light around it. "How does it look on me?"

The contrast between the black and her eyes was unsettling. He made a face. Lalana shifted back and spun her hands; no answer pleased her quite so much as the sort of answer she could read on his face, even when it was entirely negative.

"Let's get you back."

He ordered the hallways cleared between his quarters and the lab. As it was after 0800, Larsson was on the door, just starting his shift, and Allan on break. Mischkelovitz was asleep and Lab 26 was otherwise empty. Lorca walked Lalana all the way to her room.

"I wish you much success on your mission," she said as they stood in the doorway.

"If I don't see you again—"

Her tail flicked violently to the side and her hands pressed together. "You will. You have to. You owe me that face. And I will be ready when you need me."

Lorca looked at her with genuine appreciation. "I can't thank you enough."

"You can. It will simply take you a long time to do so. That is why you must remain alive." His face crinkled with happiness and showed the same truth she had known with the first Lorca: when he smiled, he became joy. She spun her hands with a rapidity he had not seen before. "Until we meet again, Gabriel Lorca."

He couldn't top that, so he shook his head, smiling to himself as he made his way out.

Larsson was still on the door. Lorca fished the fortune out from his pocket and offered it up. Larsson's confusion at the gesture turned to disgust as he realized what it said. _Your principles mean more to you than any money or success_. It was the replacement fortune from the Memory Alpha mission Larsson had tried to discard.

"Why?" asked Larsson.

Lorca smirked. "You can't escape destiny."

"This is bullshit, you know," said Larsson of both the fortune and the concept of destiny, which was a step too far for Lorca.

"Watch it," said Lorca. "I'm still captain, and don't think I don't know it was you who brought Lalana to my quarters. Again." Technically, Larsson's first transgression in this regard had been against the other Lorca, but to the crew at large, Lorca still _was_ the other version of himself.

"You're welcome," said Larsson. "What was that, second time this month?"

"Think very carefully before you say another word, lieutenant."

Larsson shrugged. "I'm glad. I know it doesn't do anything for her, but... she missed it all the same because she likes doing it for you."

There was something sweet in that, even if it was a little disappointing to know the experience was far from fully reciprocal. Lorca's eyebrows rose up. "She told you that?"

"We are friends, you know. She's told me a lot over the years. Apparently, the sounds you make are amazing!" The sheer delight Larsson seemed to take in exposing Lorca bordered on criminal.

"You are entirely out of line," said Lorca, voice dropping into the sort of warning that suggested if Larsson did not display an appropriate level of respect soon, he could say hello to the brig.

"What, you going to demote me? I work for O'Malley now. You going to kick me out of Starfleet? I'll kick myself out. It's no skin off my back." This was true. Larsson was at a point in his life where he could take or leave Starfleet. The organization no longer defined who he was. "Actually, there is no Starfleet here, so..."

Lorca's response was resolute. "So long as Discovery is here, so is Starfleet." Surprisingly, he found he even believed this sentiment.

"Fair enough," admitted Larsson. "Though, I don't see what there is to be embarrassed about. I'm not one to judge. As far as I'm concerned, Lalana is the prettiest lady of them all." He chuckled.

It was a little unsettling hearing those words from Larsson's mouth. "Wait, are you telling me she... with you?"

Larsson shook his head. "No, captain. As far as I know it's only you and that couple on Risa you both like. But, uh, this sounds like a conversation you should have with her, not me."

More like a conversation that should be had with absolutely no one. Lorca pressed his fingers to his temples.

Larsson snorted. "Hey, maybe in another universe, I'm her boyfriend!" Lorca shot Larsson a long, judgmental stare. Larsson finally showed some remorse and said, "Forget I said it."

If only Lorca could. Lorca turned to leave, then thought of a potential correction that might cut Larsson back down to size. "You know O'Malley isn't Mischka's boyfriend, right?"

"O'Malley?" said Larsson. "Of course not. Actually, they are brother and sister, if you can believe it. Her boyfriend is John."

Lorca was taken aback. For a moment, it looked like Groves had fooled yet another person, but it did not add up. How could Larsson only know half the family picture? And Groves had been in the lab after the incident in the shuttle bay. "Also her brother," Lorca said slowly and uncertainly.

"Not John Groves, John Allan," clarified Larsson. "I call him her boyfriend because she sleeps in his bed when she's not in the lab. Also, they both speak that strange language, so, who knows? Maybe they are."

Lorca froze. "Allan speaks qoryan?" Also, Allan and Mischkelovitz definitely were not.

"Is that what it's called?"

A pensive darkness colored Lorca's face. After O'Malley's story, he had looked up all twelve of the QORYA subjects (promise be damned) and John Allan's name was not among them. Furthermore, O'Malley was such an oversharer, it seemed fundamentally unlikely he had neglected to mention his subordinate also had a connection to the project, and Allan's age, gender, and parentage did not line up. Allan was one of those unremarkable, dime a dozen Earth-born humans who wound up security guards because they were utterly unspectacular in any regard.

Except John Allan apparently spoke qoryan, a language that required both an algorithm no one knew and a brain capable of keeping up with and applying changes to the pattern on a daily basis.

While Lorca processed this information, John Groves appeared around the bend in the hallway, arriving at the lab for the day with a cup of tea already in hand. He was dressed in civilian clothes. He had decided being dead in this universe meant he had even less of an obligation than usual to conform to a starship dress code. "Morning, cap'n," he said nonchalantly, noting the perturbed look on Lorca's face. "You look like someone got your goat. Please tell me it was me."

Lorca did not answer immediately. "Or I might have yours." Potentially every single unknown word that had passed between Groves and Mischkelovitz could now be translated.

"Oh, this oughta be good," said Groves, stopping in front of the door and sipping his tea. "Exactly how have you got me this time? Have I violated some law in this hellhole of a universe? Or you just trying to bully me into being your legal counsel? You can't afford me, captain." His lips curled with amusement but his eyes remained eternally dim.

Groves was clearly taunting him. Lorca realized the whole thing was a waste of time. He had no interest in being baited into anything by Groves and the content of those conversations was probably not worth the time it would take to unravel them. Anyway, what did it matter now? Lorca had almost everything he needed. Qoryan was nothing but a lingering, nagging mystery, the results of which would likely be as unsatisfying as everything else involving John Groves. With a small shake of his head, Lorca started to walk away.

Then he changed his mind, turned on his heel, and asked Groves point-blank: "How does Allan know qoryan?"

Groves' dead-eyed stare lasted half a second and then he began to laugh hysterically. "Allan! Speak qoryan!? As if!" He guffawed with such force it caused tea to spill onto the floor. (This was why you were not supposed to walk around with drinks in hand on a starship.) When he caught sight of Lorca's dispassionate glare he realized it was not a joke and the laughter died as abruptly as it had started. "That's not... He doesn't. He can't. Why would you even say that?"

"I heard him speak it to Mischka," said Larsson.

Groves stared at them both, trying to decide if they were insane or just criminally stupid.

"Speak of the devil," said Larsson.

It was 0900. Allan, dressed in the solid black of a low-ranking Terran officer, was returning from his hourlong break. He found himself staring at three people who were suddenly very, very interested in him, even if Groves did not outwardly look it.

"Kel maal ze ma'kroh ii'protiim?" said Groves.

Allan blinked. "Sorry, what?" he said, as if he did not know what Groves was saying.

Groves licked his lips in momentary thought. "Kes rahn me saprohti ma'tiin, e krii me'patrosso, je maal tolte kaparo'tiin biis me-latohn. Ji ma'krahto vasohn? Pes ma'trohti katanno. En praldo vas'o'trohtiin, des katrossi mekiil en prrralta vasokronnen keshmira Mischka se'patroht. Jyun sel me'kranna. Kiiskan."

Groves signaled Larsson to open the door for him and stepped into the access chamber. The door slid shut behind him.

"Well what did he say?" asked Larsson.

Allan paled and stared at the door. "I don't understand," he said.

"Can you or can you not translate that?" asked Lorca. "Because if you can, I have a mess of footage you're gonna—"

"Give me the padd!" exclaimed Allan, snatching it from Larsson and hitting the internal lab security feed. "This isn't happening."

Lorca stepped towards Allan and glanced at the feed. Groves was going to the lab's emergency weapons locker.

"Lorca to Groves. What the hell are you playing at?"

The answer, of course, came in qoryan. "E prelto maal, caskannan! Kesii mi'kiinan!" Groves removed a phaser from the locker. Lorca signaled Larsson to open the door. As the outer doors opened, Groves pressed the phaser to his forehead.

Well, that was unequivocal and dramatic. Lorca decided he appreciated the theatrics for once and was reminded of Lalana's "overkill" line. Best case scenario, Groves was about to solve the problem of himself for Lorca. What a lovely morning this was.

Despite the utter futility of the action, Allan rushed forward and started banging on the inner door. "John! Don't!" he shouted at the door. Lorca and Larsson followed Allan in, Larsson readying his phaser rifle.

"Pelsha mek'tal," said Groves over the comm, "al'pai'men res'tah." He closed his eyes and started to squeeze the trigger as the outer doors closed. Lorca reached for the internal door controls.

" _Je rohs sivannen kel-vakto mehs-kahl es pralto ki'mennen al'ohs kaal!_ "

There it was, an entire, unbroken qoryan sentence out of Allan's mouth which, Lorca knew, had been the whole point. Lorca touched the door controls. Groves turned the phaser from his own head towards Allan as the doors opened. They all knew the phaser was currently set to kill. In response, Larsson pointed his rifle at Groves.

As this little standoff formed, the door to Lalana's room opened and she strode out, drawn by the commotion. "What is going on—The halo of stars!"

Lorca knew this did not refer to him because he was the space between the stars. Neither did it refer to Larsson, Lalana's friend of nearly ten years, or her morning tea and chess partner of the past several months, Groves.

Lorca grabbed Larsson's rifle and pointed it at Allan.

Allan made no move to take hold of the rifle hanging from the strap over his shoulder. He threw up his hands in surrender. "I can explain!" he said.

"Start," growled Lorca.

Suddenly, the comms again. "Commander Saru to Captain Lorca. It is past 0900—"

"Not now!" shouted Lorca. "Close channel." He noticed Lalana moving towards Allan. "Stay back!"

Lalana ignored the order. She was not afraid. To her, the stars remained a sign of something good. She spun her hands. "It is amazing, it is like you are made of stars! But I do not understand. You were not on the Triton. Were you?"

Allan made a sudden motion with his jaw, clamping it shut with rapid force, and vanished.

Not vanished in the light of a transporter, vanished in the sense of one moment he was there and the next he was gone as if he had not been there at all. There was no shimmer or fade. There was only a faint rush of air, as if Allan's disappearance had created a small vacuum in the room.

Then there was a faint _tink_ as the panel beneath Mischkelovitz's desk popped open. Lorca whipped the rifle towards it but lowered the weapon when he realized the source of the noise. Mischkelovitz crawled out wearing men's pajamas, bleary-eyed from being woken up. "Why is there shouting!" she whined at them. From the miserable pitch of her voice, Lorca could momentarily accept O'Malley's assertion that she was eternally twelve.

"Emellia! You have just missed the most amazing thing. I saw the halo of stars, and he vanished right in front of us!"

Lorca and Groves looked at one another. Neither was quite sure what to say about this turn of events, but Lorca suspected that if they checked the security footage, they were going to see a single frame of an almost imperceptible black shadow standing where John Allan had been.

They checked. Lorca was right.


	76. Here There Be Dragons

A/N: I'm sorry if the last chapter was something of a hot mess, I just had to get it over and done with, you know? Did you see that one coming? Are the dots starting to connect about what happened and is happening now? Well, the answer still isn't what you think it is, I can promise you that. One by one, though, the dominoes, they are falling. Exactly as they were designed to.

This chapter continues with the events of episode 10, "Despite Yourself."

* * *

They sat in the lab with cups of hot tea going over what they knew, which was not much. Saru and O'Malley had both been summoned for the occasion and were standing together against the far wall, O'Malley leaning back and looking dazed. Saru seemed unusually alert even for a Kelpien, though the absence of his threat ganglia seemed to indicate that the danger, if ever there had been any, was gone. Lorca had taken Groves' usual seat, Mischkelovitz was in the chair at her desk, Larsson was half-sitting on the worktable because he was tall enough the table was practically a stool in comparison, and Lalana was sitting on the worktable itself. Groves was pacing around in agitation.

The mission to infiltrate the Terran Empire had been pushed to 1200 hours pending some tentative resolution of this Allan matter and "Captain Tilly" had the bridge, for better or worse. At least Burnham was with her.

Mischkelovitz was doing her best to explain. "He never said anything in qoryan until after Mischka died."

"And you didn't think that was odd?" asked Groves, waving his hands for emphasis. He was conducting the interrogation in a bombastic manner. Absent access to the wider world in his youth, Groves had largely formed his impressions of what it meant to be a lawyer by watching legal procedurals from the QORYA cultural archive and it showed. His interrogation style was pure courtroom theatrics, the sort that had gotten him thrown in contempt more than once. It had also necessitated the confiscation of his tea until such time as he stopped spilling it all over the place.

Mischkelovitz shook her head. "I figured he learned it listening to us speak it every day." Allan had been assigned as Mischkelovitz's security detail when she and Milosz had joined Starfleet, ostensibly to protect Milosz's weapons research from parties who would seek to steal it for their own benefit. He had spent twelve years alongside them guarding their workroom.

Groves did not find Mischkelovitz's answer acceptable. "You figured he just learned it by listening!?"

"That's how we learned it."

"Yeah, ten thousand iterations ago! And if Mac can't learn it after twenty damn years, you really think some S.O.B. is going to learn it standing around listening to you!?"

"Well, but Mally isn't very smart," said Mischkelovitz, which was not a kind thing to say when O'Malley was physically in the room and entirely untrue. Lorca had by this point realized O'Malley was perfectly intelligent, even above average, just not as smart as Groves and Mischkelovitz. Their metric for intelligence was totally skewed. Objectively speaking, even if O'Malley were the dumbest person in the room (he was not, it was Larsson by a mile in Lorca's estimation), he was still not as dumb as Mischkelovitz and Groves thought he was. Moreover, O'Malley had an emotional intelligence that put both of theirs combined to shame.

"Mischka," said Lorca, arms crossed in Groves' chair. "Again from the top."

* * *

After relaying her history with Allan once more, Mischkelovitz sat looking at her hands in her lap, downcast. She felt like she had failed the captain somehow. In a sense, she had, but understandably so. John Allan had embedded himself so thoroughly and for so long into Starfleet that no one had been any the wiser as to his true origins. They still weren't, not really.

That included O'Malley. Yet again the colonel had proved himself useless. O'Malley knew Allan primarily as an ignored piece of backdrop from his sister's life, a man who stood at a door outside wherever she and Milosz happened to be working, and nothing else. They were bunkmates, and he described Allan as amiable, chatty, and friendly, but beyond that, nothing. Oh, he knew Allan supposedly had parents in Nebraska, was an only child, and liked skiing, but Allan was apparently a master of supplying the most generic personal information and deflecting inquiries with affable charm. Mischkelovitz had spent twelve years with Allan and knew even less; she had never thought to ask in the first place and Allan never offered.

"If we were in our universe I could dig up his full personnel file," O'Malley noted, which did none of them any good because they were not in their own universe and Allan had no file in this universe they could consult because he did not exist here.

Which only led credence to the theory.

"We aren't seriously considering this, are we?" asked O'Malley.

"Unless you've got a better idea," said Lorca. The snarky bite in his tone was unmistakable.

"Well, I still think he might have been some kind of alien," said O'Malley, because that was an idea he found easier to wrap his head around.

"An alien who vanished in the blink of an eye," said Lorca, frowning at O'Malley in a clear challenge for an explanation as to how being an alien explained the precise effect of Allan's disappearance.

"Less than a blink," said Groves.

"Entirely less, as I do not blink," said Lalana.

O'Malley looked over at Saru. He was too tired to make sense of it really and was no scientist, but he trusted the one he was standing next to. "What do you think?"

Saru had spent a lot of time taking in information and very little questioning or commenting on any of it. He had been quietly trying to tear the idea apart in his head to determine its veracity and process the ramifications. "The data would seem to fit," said Saru. "We have observed temporal phenomena coinciding with what the captain, Lieutenant Larsson, and Mr. Groves have observed firsthand." Null time, in other words.

"Then we're agreed," declared Lorca. "Major Allan was a time traveler."

"Is a time traveler," said Groves. "I mean, it's not like he's dead."

"No, but I doubt he's coming back," Lorca said. Now that they knew what Allan was, it was reasonable to think he had flown the coop for good.

Mischkelovitz mumbled something. Only Groves caught it. "Fair point. From his perspective, we've probably been dead centuries or millennia, and he hasn't been born yet. Schrodinger's..." He looked for a good word that epitomized Allan and ended up going with the full text of his earlier summation. "...son of a bitch."

Larsson had been largely quiet throughout this discussion. He suddenly jerked as if jolted by something electric. "Living history!" he said, his low voice a veritable boom in the room. Lorca raised an eyebrow in a demand for explanation.

In truth, Larsson was probably as smart as O'Malley, but Lorca did not know the full extent of Larsson's intelligence the way the other Gabriel Lorca had. Lorca had never given his Einar Larsson the opportunity to be anything more than a security officer and had only skimmed this Larsson's history book on the Uanar-Barosic Wars. Like everyone, Lorca had taken Larsson's size as an indicator of his capabilities and neither version of Larsson had ever done much to disavow Lorca of this notion. The two Larssons shared a healthy disdain for duties and responsibility. It made them both seem loutish.

"Something he said one day. That living history is better than reading it or something. Think about it. We are the first ship with a spore drive, and we are the first to visit another universe"—Larsson was unaware of the Defiant files—"so we are probably a big deal in history."

"Yes, but he didn't just come aboard Discovery, he's been with Melly for nigh on twelve years now," O'Malley pointed out.

"That's a hell of a long con just to get aboard Discovery," said Groves. Lorca had to smile faintly at that because he understood the lengths to which a person might go to establish a decent cover story.

Larsson scratched his cheek thoughtfully. "He's probably gone back to the future."

"No," said Saru, "I do not think he has. Unless he possesses the ability to travel between universes, he would only be able to reach the future of this timeline. In which case..." Saru trailed off uncertainly, but Lorca could tell it was because Saru had thought of something significant.

"Well don't leave us in suspense," Lorca demanded.

"Operating under the assertion he is a time traveler, Major Allan would likely not have signed on for a one-way trip to this universe. For all Starfleet knows right now, we are in fact dead in some sort of accident. I must therefore conclude that he had full expectation of making it back to our universe, meaning we will make it back."

"Ah," said Groves, "but that's ignoring one thing: the need to know the unknown. Maybe no one knows what happened to us because we never make it back, and Allan just wanted to solve the mystery by experiencing it himself."

"If he suspected we would be dead, he would likely have used his technology to leave the ship at the moment of the accident and sent us with some form of sensor technology to record the event without sacrificing himself. Since he did not leave, he must have known we would survive."

"And let's not forget the long con," said Lorca.

"Indeed," Saru agreed. "I do not believe Major Allan was here for Discovery at all, but for Dr. Mischkelovitz."

All eyes turned to her. She had been silent for a very long time now. Her response to six set of eyes was to slide off her chair onto the floor and start for the panel that led her sleeping area. (Not for the first time, Lorca wondered what it was like in there. So far as he could tell from the hours he had spent watching Mischkelovitz in null time, things disappeared into the walls that never came back out, and none of those things were cleaning products. He imagined it a dark, smelly mess.)

"Melly," went O'Malley, pushing off the wall and moving towards her.

Lorca did not get up but did his part to stop Mischkelovitz all the same. "Mischka, stay put. That's an order."

She stopped but remained underneath her desk, curling into a ball with her knees at her chin. She started crying, of course. O'Malley crouched down and rubbed his hand on her back in comfort.

"I'm sorry," she whimpered, "it's my fault, isn't it? I make everything worse for everybody!"

Lorca sighed and frowned. He felt bad for Mischkelovitz, but also annoyed at her. Maybe she no longer tripped over her words as severely as she had at the beginning of this journey, but she still cried at the drop of a pin and that was not helpful. "We're not blaming you," he offered, even though inwardly he was a little bit. Maybe even a lot. It was hard not to.

Saru clasped his hands and twisted to the side so he could make out Mischkelovitz's form under the desk. "I do not think you have made this worse at all, Emellia. If anything, I believe now we know that we will make it home, or at least that we will be able to send some message back to our universe indicating we are well."

Someone else might have found this a comfort. Not Mischkelovitz.

"But I don't want to go home!" she wailed. "I want to be an officer on the Buran! A bridge officer!"

Lorca's mouth fell open, but he closed it again quickly. It made a sort of sense. Mischkelovitz had nothing to look forward to back at Starfleet. Outside Discovery, she remained a pariah, everyone she cared about was here, and she had apparently realized the version of her that lived in this universe was not broken the way she was and had attained a certain degree of success. That Emellia Petrellovitz now lay in Imperial jail for treason did not seem to dampen Mischkelovitz's envy of her.

Only Lalana was undisturbed by Mischkelovitz's outburst. She remained resolutely focused on the matter at hand as she said, "You are all forgetting about the Triton. That had nothing to do with Emellia, but Major Allan was also there."

Lorca shook his head. "We don't know that was him."

"I have only ever seen one sort of star halo, and while perhaps every time traveler has the same one, I do believe it was Major Allan on the Triton, or else why would he have disappeared when I mentioned it?"

It was an excellent point. Assuming Discovery made it back, had Allan gone back in time to meddle with something in the past as a preventative measure? If so, he had clearly failed to realize the Gabriel Lorca from back then was not the one currently in command.

"Why didn't he know we were going to expose him?" asked Groves. "He should have known this was going to happen and been able to prevent it because he was from the future. Unless..." He turned to the main wall console in the lab. "We delete all the files pertaining to this incident and kill him. That way he can't warn himself and the timeline is preserved."

"Whoa!" went O'Malley, jumping to his feet and momentarily abandoning Mischkelovitz. "We're not killing anyone!"

"You really don't do half-measures, do you, Groves?" said Lorca. Groves made a dismissive sound and shrugged. The corner of Lorca's mouth twitched into a smile. "I mean, surely there was another way to out Allan short of threatening to commit suicide."

That got another reaction from O'Malley. "What!" He looked at Groves with an expression of hopeless abandonment. Then he pressed his hands to his face and groaned in exasperation. "I can't believe any of this is happening."

There was nothing really O'Malley and Larsson could add at this point, particularly given how tired O'Malley was. "Larsson, colonel, you can go," Lorca offered. Larsson was happy enough to leave, but O'Malley hesitated, glancing down at Mischkelovitz. Lorca looked at him emphatically: " _Go_." There was something in the look that said not to worry about Mischkelovitz.

With the room thinned significantly, Saru spoke again. "Captain, another point. If in fact we do return to our original universe, I think it is entirely likely Allan is still onboard, so that he may come with us when we do."

"Mm," agreed Lorca. "Organize a search of the ship top to bottom, but keep a lid on the reason. Lalana, see if you can spot any more of those shadows on the security feeds. Groves, you and Mischkelovitz help Saru work out the where, what, and why and figure out if Allan did anything else to my ship. Make sure he can't do anything else, either. Set up extra security around the engineering lab and maybe see about rigging some sort of alarm if one of those shadows turns up again so we'll be able to respond quicker."

"Yes, captain," said Saru.

"Groves, you can probably think of a few likely hiding places, so assist Saru with the security sweep to start."

Groves squinted. He did have an instinct for nooks and crannies, but it made no sense for Lorca to know that. He relaxed slightly when he realized Lorca was probably just trying to get Mischkelovitz alone and rolled his eyes at the thought. He'd picked up on the pattern of Lorca and Mischkelovitz's interactions in recent weeks. "You know, it's not that Saru here isn't great, but I want to point out, Allan's exposure could be because we never make it back and that's why he didn't know about it."

Once upon a time, Saru would have been cowed by someone like John Groves. Not any more. "I still do not believe Major Allan would have remained aboard for the jump if he knew it would likely lead to his death, or that he would be mysteriously lost with the ship and never recovered."

Groves shrugged. From where he was standing, one of them was a bona fide genius, and the other was Saru.

"Whatever your thoughts, Groves, Saru's the one in charge. Got it?"

"Meh," said Groves.

"What of the mission, captain?" asked Saru.

It had been postponed long enough for this mess. "It's still a go. Tell Burnham I'm on my way. The sooner we get a move on, the sooner this'll all be over. Now you've got your orders. Go."

Groves said "aye, captain" to that, yet again managing to make compliance sound insulting. Lorca heard Groves continue to argue the point about what Allan's exposure meant as the doors closed after him and Saru. That left only Lalana on top of one table and Mischkelovitz under another.

"Do you know," said Lalana tapping her fingers together in something that was almost like spinning, "I was right."

Lorca blinked at her, which was as good as a fully-voiced question as to what she had been right about.

"Null time. That was Major Allan. I am certain now that he did not mean to kill us and in fact knew the event would cause us no harm. Perhaps he only meant to further our understanding of our spore drive and the other projects."

"Then he picked a damn strange way to go about it. With all that power rationing, we didn't make much progress on anything."

"Nn, that is true. But if not that, then I wonder what his intentions were."

"You and me both," said Lorca. He hated that there were mysteries he would never know the answers to. That left only one lingering matter to attend to. "Mischka?"

She shivered at the sound of her shared name. There were still fresh tears on her face, but less now, and her cheeks were dry with tracks of salt. "Can I go now?" she half-whined, half-whimpered, but in such a small voice it was not entirely annoying.

Lorca sighed faintly. Then he got up from his chair and sat down on the floor next to her. Lalana watched from the table.

"You know, you remind me of someone. She used to hide, too. She lost her parents, y'see. The woman who took her in was a lot of things and none of them nice. All that little girl wanted was for someone to read her a bedtime story. The way her parents used to." Lorca smiled sadly at the memory. It felt like a lifetime ago because it was. After a long moment of silence, he said, "Do you know who she grew up to be? The bravest, smartest, most capable woman I ever met. Type of person who looked at you and made you think you could do the impossible."

Just to describe her again made Lorca smile. A lone tear rolled down along Mischkelovitz's nose. Lorca reached over and brushed the tear away with his thumb. "I'll tell you the same thing I told her. You're stronger than you know." He let the words hang in the air a moment and was gratified to see new tears form in Mischkelovitz's eyes in response to the sentiment. "No matter what happens from here on out, you have done the impossible, Mischka. So don't ever wish you were someone else. From where I'm sittin', this version of you is the best one, tears and all."

On the table, Lalana observed this and spun her hands. He was not her Gabriel, and perhaps most people would not be able to forgive the way he had manipulated Mischkelovitz into doing what he needed her to or the fact that the main reason he liked her tears so much was that they had driven Culber and Stamets to allow one last jump, but to Lalana, there was nothing to forgive. Blame was not a lului concept. His manipulations were merely part of the thousand million tiny interactions that had brought them all to this point in time and this point in time was something she was enjoying.

Mischkelovitz acknowledged Lorca's sentiments with a nod. He gave her arm a supportive squeeze and stood up. He had more important matters to attend to, but there was no reason he could not provide in absentia the same service he had so long ago to someone who reminded him of that precious memory. "Lalana. Why don't you tell Mischka a story?"

"What story should I tell?"

"Your favorite."

* * *

He left the lab, but not entirely. He stood in the access chamber between the inner and outer doors momentarily lost in memory. It was hard sometimes, knowing the person he loved most in the universe—in any universe—was gone and would not be coming back barring some great miracle. Time travel would certainly fit the bill, but trying to wrap his head around how you could hold the body of someone you loved in your arms and somehow also prevent that moment left Lorca as reluctant about the concept of time travel as O'Malley was.

Lorca was still certain Allan was a time traveler, he just did not know what that information meant, if anything, and there seemed to be no way for him to use it to his advantage. Absent more information, he had to stay the course he had already chosen. Besides, if Groves was right about the fact Allan should have been able to prevent exposure, it meant time travel was potentially more useless than it sounded.

Who would be proven right at the end of this, Saru or Groves? Had Allan come with them to this universe because he knew they would make it back out? Or did the fact he had not known he would be exposed indicate the opposite?

He sighed. Either way, this ship had given him so much. Miracle after miracle. Here was hoping the miracles continued and that this whole charade went over better the second time around. He sincerely doubted he'd get a third chance.

* * *

Tilly and Burnham were both in the ready room waiting for him. Seeing them dressed in gold and black Terran uniforms, Lorca was awestruck. It was like a waking dream. "Impressive," he told them. He forced himself to focus on Tilly so as not to betray too much.

Looking at Tilly, she seemed to be standing straighter, stronger now. "Well, let's not keep these assholes waiting," she said confidently. Some note of surprise must have showed on his face, because she immediately worried, "Too much?"

"No," he assured her, "not here. Here, it's just right."

He sent Tilly out to the bridge to hail the ISS Shenzhou. That left him with Burnham. Almost impossible Burnham. A miracle made flesh. "Do or die time," he told her. "There's no going back. Tie me up?" He offered Burnham his wrists.

Burnham pressed the restraints into place. "There is never any going back," she said, "as the Vulcan Science Directorate has determined that time travel is impossible."

Lorca snorted. If only she knew what had just happened down in Lab 26. "Remind me again, what did they say about alternate realities?"

Burnham seemed perturbed by that. Whatever answer she might have given was cut off by the communications feed from the bridge as the transmission between Discovery and the Shenzhou went live.

The captain of the Shenzhou was a young, raven-haired man named Connor. As Burnham stared at his image on the viewscreen, her eyes widened.

"You know him?" Lorca asked.

"He was my ops officer on the Shenzhou." Someone she had lost, then. They had both lost so many people. "I watched him die at the Battle of the Binary Stars. I knew we'd encounter familiar faces. But is this what it's gonna be like here?"

There was pain on her face, regret. Lorca watched her and wished for a moment he could have offered a bedtime story, but they had no such connection. That was something he had shared with another person, not her. A person who just happened to have Burnham's face. Seeing the sadness on that face made his heart ache. He swallowed.

He heard Tilly say she had found a disabled shuttle containing something most interesting.

"I believe that's our cue," he said, glad to have something to focus on that was not Burnham's restrained anguish. They moved to the door and stood side by side, ready to step onto the bridge for the reveal. Lorca had a sudden thought. Groves was not the only one capable of extremes to sell a point. "And probably best we look the part." He slammed his head into the nearest wall panel, twice, leaving a splatter of blood as the skin of his nose and along his eye socket split.

He turned to Burnham. She hid her shock well and when he looked at her, it felt like he could do the impossible again.

"Showtime," he said. They emerged onto the bridge.

The exchange of words that followed between Burnham and Connor was almost too much to bear. As Burnham declared she had faked her own death and demanded the return of her ship, Lorca almost heard his Michael, but the voice was still too calm, too sedate, too controlled. He found the pale imitation frustrated him. He wanted her to be his Burnham so badly and she wasn't, even and especially as she forced him to his knees in a display of submission.

His face spoke the discomfort he felt plainly. He had always stood side by side with her. It had never been like this. This Burnham was making a decent show of dominance, which was good, but it was a show. On some fundamental level she did not understand who she was in this universe and she never would. She was but an echo of the person he had known.

Then Lorca heard Connor speak words he did not like at all.

"We have a rebel group pinned down in this system. It would be better if you come to us."

Thankfully, Lorca was staring at the floor, so no one caught the flicker of concern on his face. He knew from the mission sitrep what system the Shenzhou was in, which meant he knew exactly who those rebels were.

This was going to complicate things entirely.


	77. Hook Line and Sinker

A/N: This episode continues with the events of episode 10, "Despite Yourself," and continues into episode 11, "The Wolf Inside."

The cookies, they are apropos. How they continue to be so apropos when I am randomly pulling them, I don't know.

* * *

Lorca, Burnham, Tilly, and Saru stood in the transporter room, preparing to beam over to the Shenzhou, but they were still missing Tyler. "Lieutenant Tyler, report to transporter room one," Saru broadcast over the shipwide comm for the second time, noticeably more emphatic than the first summons.

"Where the hell is he," grumbled Lorca.

"Computer, locate Lieutenant Tyler," said Saru. The computer reported Tyler in a corridor on deck seven, ostensibly on his way to them now.

Burnham was quick to defend Tyler. A little too quick, really. "I'm sure there's a good reason, sir. We should make sure there are no further delays once he arrives. Cadet?"

Tilly was holding the restraints. Lorca lifted an eyebrow. There was a joke here he was sure Burnham would not appreciate, so instead he held up the fortune cookies he had grabbed out of the ready room on the way down. "Then we'd better get this out of the way first."

He could see Burnham considering his pronouncement, thinking this was maybe not the most appropriate time for cookies, but she took one anyway because Tyler had told her it was one of Lorca's little rituals and it seemed only polite to grant it on the cusp of such a risky mission.

Lorca offered the second to Tilly.

"Oh! Uh, thank you," said Tilly, taking it and tucking the wrist restraint under her arm. "But shouldn't this go to..."

"Fortune is for people who arrive on time," Lorca said, reminding Tilly of the shuttle ride to Memory Alpha. Lorca cracked his cookie and looked at Burnham. She was chewing thoughtfully and staring at her fortune. "What's the verdict?"

Burnham glanced at him, realizing he meant her to share. "You will be called to fill a position of honor and responsibility."

Lorca froze. A chill coursed down his spine. He looked awkwardly surprised for a moment. Then he resumed chewing and offered only a mild, "You are about to fill the shoes of one Captain Michael Burnham. Speaking of captains." He glanced towards Tilly expectantly.

Tilly wiped cookie dust from her mouth and chin. "You believe in the goodness of mankind," she read aloud. She smiled, but then the smile turned to confusion. Two days ago, the fortune would have held true, but two days ago she had not known there were any parallel universes and this one was making her doubt all her assumptions about people.

Burnham made as if to crumple her fortune. "Ah!" went Lorca, stopping her. "Keep it with you. For luck." He slipped his own fortune, _You have an active mind and a keen imagination_ , in his coat pocket and held out his wrists for the restraints.

"Luck is a primitive superstition," said Burnham.

"Maybe, but we need all of it we can get!" exclaimed Tilly. She looked at Burnham nervously. "Especially since you'll be completely surrounded by... Terrans."

"Specialist Burnham is very capable of taking care of herself," said Saru.

Lorca shook his wrists at Tilly for her to get to it with the restraints. Burnham put the fortune into her pocket alongside her own personal totem: the rank insignia that once belonged to Captain Philippa Georgiou of the USS Shenzhou.

"Don't you worry, cadet. Gonna look after her. Mr. Saru, you're in charge now." It was an easy statement. There was no one he trusted more with the ship. The restraints clicked into place. Lorca looked at Tilly again, her face framed by that ridiculous blonde ombré haircut. "Well, I guess you're in charge to anybody _off_ the ship, Captain Killy." Tilly stared at him with faint discomfort. She really did not like her counterpart's reputation.

Lorca issued the general mission orders as he moved onto the transporter pad. "Maintain a safe distance. Close enough to transport us back as soon as Burnham gets her hands on the Defiant files."

"I won't let you down, sir," promised Tilly.

"I know you won't," he replied. Her first attempt to impersonate Killy had not gone well, but she had proven on the second that he had been right about her. She did not make the same mistakes twice.

The doors opened. Tyler finally arrived.

"Where were you?" asked Lorca.

Tyler seemed dazed. "Uh, I-I'm not sure, sir."

It was a very strange answer. "What?" asked Lorca, concerned.

Tyler looked at Burnham for some sort of courage. He must have found it, because his voice steadied as he said, "There's no excuse for my tardiness. Sorry, captain." He and Burnham moved to join Lorca on the transporter pad.

Tyler was supposed to be Lorca's rock, a man who could last seven months in Klingon prison. That was the sort of strength you needed to survive in this universe. That Tyler suddenly seemed to be to coming up short was concerning, but there was no time to worry over it. The ISS Shenzhou was expecting them. Any further delay would arouse suspicion.

"No more apologies," Lorca announced. He addressed Tyler and Burnham, voice firm with warning, eyes imploring them to take the full weight of his words to heart. "From now on, we're Terrans. Decency is a weakness will get us killed. And the lives of everyone on this ship and in the Federation are at stake. So you do what you must. _Whatever_ you must. To anyone. Understand?"

"Aye, captain," said Tyler.

"Clear, captain," said Burnham.

Lorca looked momentarily reticent. "Guess that's the last time you're calling me captain," he noted. Then he smiled. "Hopefully just for a while." He knew he was leading them into the lion's den, but there were no two people he would rather have with him, people being the operative word. If only Lalana could have beamed over. "Ready?" They took their places, assumed positions of confidence, and Lorca offered one final command: "Energize."

Saru pressed the transporter controls. Shimmering white light enveloped them and they were gone.

Tilly suddenly gasped, something she had been holding back for several minutes now. Saru tilted his head at her. "They will be fine."

"I know," said Tilly, but did not sound it. She clenched her hands over her chest.

Saru looked thoughtfully at the empty transporter pad. "I understand. I am worried, too."

Tilly was glad for the sympathy and smiled up at Saru. His being in charge made her feel better, and not just because he was trying to reassure her. He was the sort of captain she wanted to be someday. Calm under pressure, compassionate, and gently encouraging.

"You should return to the bridge in case further communications are warranted," Saru advised her.

"What about you?"

"I have another task to attend to in the captain's absence."

Another task was not the same as commanding Discovery from the bridge, as Saru should have been and would have been were it not for this awful, awful universe where humans treated every other species like second-class citizens or worse. Tilly wrinkled her nose. "I'm really sorry about this. It should be you up there, not me."

"Your apology is unnecessary. The circumstances require what they require. Under the circumstances, you are performing well, cadet."

"Thank you, sir!"

Saru nodded. "Also unnecessary, but appreciated."

Tilly started towards the door and paused. "Commander? Would it be alright if I stopped by the medical bay?"

* * *

Aside from a nurse and Stamets, sickbay was empty. "Where's Dr. Culber?" asked Tilly.

"Hopefully getting some sleep," said the nurse. Since the jump, Culber had barely left Stamets' side. The nurse moved into one of the private side offices and closed the door to give Tilly some privacy.

Stamets' condition remained unchanged. Ever since the fateful jump, he had been alternating between incoherent and catatonic states. Right now he was the latter. Tilly looked at his eyes, covered by that strange milky haze, and tried not to worry too much. "Hi, lieutenant!"

No answer, not even the faintest twitch or glimmer he had heard her. She smiled at him anyway and spoke to him for a few minutes, mostly meaningless chatter about their circumstances. Culber had said after the accident that this sort of thing could help. "If only you could see what I look like. Apparently it's... unsexy." She pulled at the long strands of straight hair and bit back a laugh.

Stamets eyes suddenly cleared and he sat up. "I see you!" he exclaimed, staring right at her with a look of unbridled joy. As scary as it was, Tilly's eyes lit up, thinking something had finally changed, that something had gotten through and he had heard her. Then he said nonsensically, "At the opera house!" The milky cloud returned and he collapsed back onto the slab unresponsive.

Tilly looked at Stamets mournfully. "I'm so sorry, lieutenant. We'll find a way to fix you. I promise." She squeezed his hand.

It worried her slightly, leaving Stamets when Culber was not there, but the nurse was in the next room. Tilly waved at her before leaving. The nurse waved back but remained in the office. She stayed there even after Tilly left. She had seen Stamets sit up and appear to speak to Tilly in a trancelike state. Stamets did that periodically and it was extremely unnerving. The nurse decided to stay in the office for the time being and focus on updating crew medical records with minor injuries sustained since the jump to this universe.

She became so engrossed in her task, she did not notice when Stamets rose from the slab and wandered out.

* * *

The bridge seemed to operate just fine without Tilly and as she sat in the captain's chair she was not sure what to do with herself. "Lieutenant Owosekun! Report!" she said.

"We're maintaining our distance from the Shenzhou as ordered."

"Well, good," said Tilly, nodding decisively.

The minutes ticked by. Tilly poked at the console on the arm of the captain's chair. It was very basic. She wondered what Lorca did when he sat in this chair for long periods of inaction. (The answer was, he did not, but Tilly was not a bridge officer and did not know this.) "Uh, Lieutenant Rhys! What's our status?"

Rhys stared at her. "We're on standby," he said. "Still some power systems under repair, but nothing affecting our weapons."

Tilly gave another decisive nod. "So... does anyone need any help with anything, or...?"

Owosekun bit back the urge to laugh at that. None of them needed any help to do their jobs. On the back row, Bryce and Rhys exchanged a look. "You know," said Bryce, "you don't have to stay in the chair."

Tilly squirmed in the chair, trying to rotate it towards Bryce. "Commander Saru said I should stay up here in case we got any more calls."

"If any come in, I can alert you in the ready room."

Tilly spun the chair a little too far. She tried not to feel too embarrassed about it. "The ready room?"

"That's what it's there for," said Bryce, smiling with what he hoped came off as encouragement.

"You are the captain," said Rhys.

Tilly considered the ready room with a frown. It was the captain's room, and its purpose was to be a place for the captain to stand at the ready. "But, not really... I'm just not sure if..."

From the ops console, Owosekun triggered the ready room doors so they slid open in invitation. Tilly still hesitated. "I mean, if you think it's really okay—"

"Yes!" they all seemed to shout at her at once. Tilly jumped slightly and shuffled over to the ready room. With one last glance of trepidation, she went in.

"Thank goodness," said Owosekun once the doors were closed again. "If she asked one more time for a status report..."

* * *

The ready room felt strange without Lorca there. It seemed cold and empty. It took Tilly's instincts a minute to calm to the point where she did not feel like an interloper. This was, after all, her dream: to be a starship captain and call such a room her own.

The lights were still dim, as Lorca preferred. "Computer," said Tilly, intending to brighten the room, but she could not bring herself to follow through with the command. "Never mind." It felt too much like a betrayal.

She hemmed and hawed in front of the food dispenser for several minutes before deciding on a piece of chocolate to calm her nerves. Burnham would not approve, but she might understand under the circumstances. As she nibbled on the chocolate, Tilly wandered around the desk. It was interesting, really. The light in this universe had a quality that reminded her of the ready room. It seemed dimmer. The twinkling stars outside the window lacked the eager brightness of the universe they were from.

The bowl of fortune cookies was not on the table. They had been removed as part of making the Discovery look like its mirror counterpart. If someone called or god forbid beamed over for a visit, it would not do for Captain Killy to have Lorca's trademark cookie bowl on her desk.

As she brought up her engineering work on the console, Tilly thought back to her earlier fortune. _You believe in the goodness of mankind._ As much as everyone in this universe seemed to be their darkest selves, Tilly had a hard time accepting that human nature could be so different. They had the same genes, same faces, same names. Did being born here really strip you of the capacity for kindness, for good? Was everyone here truly so evil?

Tilly pushed the philosophy questions aside and focused in on her engineering work. If nothing else, it was easy to focus in the dim light and quiet. But then her mind wandered back to it. Was it the light here that made everyone so scared that they were compelled to conquer the cosmos rather than explore it? Did the physics of this universe have some effect on their biology?

She was suddenly reminded of Stamets' favorite saying. Biology as physics. There was no difference. Tilly's eyes went wide. Biology as physics, what about biology as engineering?

What if she approached Stamets' condition as an engineering problem? She did not have medical expertise herself, but she certainly knew engineering, and there was someone onboard who had engineering knowledge and medical knowledge combined.

Tilly smiled confidently. "Don't you worry, lieutenant." She was going to fix him and finally she had an idea as to how.

* * *

"I'm telling you, it's pointless," said Groves. He and Saru were in Lorca's study. They had co-opted the location for the purposes of investigating Allan's disappearance. The myriad armaments and the Gorn skeleton made for a faintly macabre setting. The Reptilian knife Lorca had once deployed against Groves' basketball was sitting in a case along with a dozen other equally deadly-looking blades. "Suppose we do find him on the ship. He'll just... freeze time and zip away."

"Still, we must try."

Groves sighed. Lorca was gone. He would never know if they just input some records of searching the ship. "There's another thing to consider. So, we're assuming he can't time travel in this universe because whatever mechanism it is lets him do that, it doesn't function, right?"

"Yes." Saru wondered where Groves was going with this.

"If you're right and we get back, he's just going to loop back, warn himself he was found out, reset everything, and make it a little farther without being discovered. Wash, rinse, repeat ad nauseam, just like Harry Mudd!" Which was why Groves was so certain they had to kill Allan the minute they found him.

"John," said Saru with remarkable patience, "whether that is what happens or not, you are taking time away from the task we have been given to consider potentialities that have no bearing on it. When Captain Lorca returns, I wish for my report to reflect that even if we were unsuccessful, we were diligent in our attempt to complete it."

Groves groaned. "I hate Captain Lorca!"

"Be that as it may, he is still the captain. Now please, John. Your insights." Saru gestured to the display of the ship's layout.

Groves pointed to deck twelve. Several compartments were currently depressurized and under repair from damage sustained at Pahvo. "There."

"But there is no breathable air."

"Exactly. Perfect hiding place."

Saru was not certain Groves was taking this seriously.

There was an emergency alert. "Harrington to Saru!"

Harrington was one of the engineering maintenance staff, currently tasked with restoring electrical systems on deck twelve. "Go ahead."

There was fear in her voice. "Commander, it's—it's Lieutenant Stamets. He... I think he killed Dr. Culber!"


	78. We Get What We Deserve

A/N: This chapter concludes the events of episode 10, "Despite Yourself," and continues with the events of episode 11, "The Wolf Inside."

* * *

The brig on the ISS Shenzhou was exactly as Lorca remembered it. The three agony booths, the crackle of torture devices, the unending screams. Two of the booths were occupied. The third had been emptied for Lorca, its former occupant shunted over to the containment pen to sit and enjoy what little respite the too-bright lights of the pen offered.

"Only the finest agonizer booth reserved for the treacherous Lorca," Connor announced. Lorca resigned himself to step inside it. At least the booth had been sanitized recently. The only thing worse than getting into an agony booth was getting into one that was already drenched in someone else's urine.

"Absolutely not," said Burnham.

Connor and Lorca turned towards Burnham, Lorca's alarm evident on his face. Was she trying to spare him this? That was a mercy Terrans did not give. Connor was equally confused.

Burnham's response to this silent question was to shout. Not the kind of calm, commanding, scathingly dangerous tone that would have shut Connor down completely, but a shout that just seemed to be for the sake of shouting. There was a forced insincerity to it. "What did I say to you! I do not want some overzealous guard killing him before I have the chance. I would punish the entire ship for an error that grave!"

Lorca winced. He probably should have told Burnham what agony booths were, but he could not explain to her how he knew; the booths were so ubiquitous they did not merit definition in the rebel data core. It also felt like there was a plaintive note of desperation in her voice. Not only did it remind him yet again she was not his Michael, it might spell their downfall if she failed to convince the Shenzhou's crew of her strength.

"We would never allow him the release of death, captain," Connor assured her.

"See to it that he is installed properly here," Burnham said, addressing the brig security chief and Tyler, and still sounding entirely too unconfident. Thankfully, she finally hit her stride. "I need to access my files. Escort me to the ready room." She strode away with Connor.

The brig commander issued some quick orders. Double-check the monitoring systems, set low thresholds for the alarms that warned when someone was entering potentially deadly distress. (Alarms which were usually turned off. People sentenced to spend time in agony booths were typically expendable.)

Lorca was mildly annoyed by this result. He did not need to be coddled where agony booths were concerned. He also noticed Tyler seemed slightly dazed and decided the best thing to do was also the thing that came most naturally to him.

"Well, now that it's just us chickens, who's up for a little mutiny? I'll make it worth your while." He smirked. He received only silent glares in response, but it was his way of signaling to Tyler that everything was fine.

Tyler's expression showed no sign of reassurance at the joke. He looked as dazed as before. Lorca's eyebrows knit in momentary concern. Tyler's head was not in the game. He needed Tyler in the game more than ever because he was counting on Tyler to protect Burnham.

The security chief came and removed his restraints, then shoved him backwards into the booth. Lorca smirked at her. "Maybe you'd like to come in here, too? I can show you a good—" He never finished. The door clicked shut and the booth turned on and he screamed as his skin seemed to light on fire with electricity. Every nerve, every synapse lit up with pain. He had to fight to keep his hands from clawing at his face—that was a rookie mistake where agony booths were concerned, and he was no rookie. As he screamed and screamed and screamed, he forgot all about Tyler.

* * *

Connor picked up on the flaws in Burnham's performance. Even if he had not, her demise was the only way for him to keep his captaincy of the Shenzhou. He came at her in the turbolift between the brig and the bridge. Burnham was forced to defend herself, stabbing him with his own knife and feeling a rising panic as his eyes went wide at the realization that his life was ending.

It was the second time Burnham had watched him die, and even though Connor had tried to kill her, it felt as horrible as the first. When the turbolift doors opened and his lifeless body spilled out onto the bridge, the crew assembled there began to applaud. Crew with familiar faces: Kayla Detmer, currently Discovery's helmsman and formerly helmsman of the USS Shenzhou, standing as the ISS Shenzhou's first officer. Around her, Weetan, Januzzi, Gant—officers Burnham had served with and known for years, but complete strangers as they applauded Connor's death.

She was glad for the solitude of the ready room and equally saddened by it. It had the same dimensions and layout as the ready room of the USS Shenzhou. She and Captain Georgiou had spent so many hours in there, planning missions and reporting to Starfleet and reviewing ship operations. This room was different, darker, and decorated to be faintly menacing, but it was familiar all the same.

That was the worst thing, she decided as she scanned for the Defiant files. Everything here felt familiar yet wrong, like looking at yourself in an unmirrored photograph.

She found the files. There was a problem. The data was massive, encrypted, and behind a formidable firewall. It could not be transmitted off the ship undetected.

After dealing with general ship matters and receiving a comprehensive update on the Shenzhou's status, Burnham retired for the night into the captain's quarters. It was a relief when Tyler contacted her on the comms. "How's the captain?" she asked.

She could hear Tyler exhale heavily. "It was... horrible. He's hanging in there..."

The captain was not her only concern. She could only imagine how that scene had looked to Tyler after surviving Klingon prison for seven months. Her voice softened. "How are you?"

"I wish I were with you."

Burnham wished that, too. "We should keep a low profile for now." Talking was some comfort, so they did that for a few minutes and then Burnham slept as best she could in a bed that was not her own on a ship where it felt like the shadows were filled with daggers.

In the morning, she beelined for the brig. She could hear the screams from the hallway. The first thing she saw when the doors opened was Lorca in the same agony booth as the day before.

Burnham addressed the brig commander. "I want to speak to the prisoner. Alone. Clear out this rabble." It was a fierce, determined voice, entirely what it needed to be. If Lorca had been aware enough to hear it, he would have described it as steel and approved entirely.

"As you command, captain," said the brig commander. She rounded up the brig's other occupants with brutal efficiency and herded them away, the brig guards following. Burnham and Lorca were alone but the room was still filled with the sounds of Lorca's screaming. It was a different scream than Tyler had observed the day previous; lower, hoarser, more of a keening than a full-throated sound.

Burnham went to the brig console and found the command to turn off the booth. Lorca's voice terminated into a gasp and he sank down in the booth with exhausted relief. Burnham dashed over and opened the door.

Lorca looked up at her, breathing heavily. "Oh," he said, and managed to swallow. "It's you." He closed his eyes and relaxed, his breaths leveling out into a slow, even rhythm.

Burnham crouched down and tried to help him up, but he waved her off.

"Just... give me a minute."

He seemed utterly exhausted. "Were you in here all night?"

Lorca gave a snort of amusement. "Is it morning already?"

Burnham stared. How could they keep someone in this state for such prolonged periods? "Sir, at this rate, I'm uncertain how much more of this you can take." The stress alone seemed potentially fatal.

"Ah, they pull you out when you lose consciousness," he told her, managing a smile. "I just haven't yet. Guess I'm made of pretty strong stuff." It was a point of personal pride. He could go longer in an agony booth than almost anybody.

He motioned for Burnham to help him up. He stood up straight and tall and stepped out of the booth, rotating his shoulders to ease the stiffness out of them. Noting Burnham's continued look of concern, Lorca offered, "I'm fine. Good thing I skipped breakfast. Hate to embarrass myself the way some others have." He looked over at the adjacent booths. That was another rookie mistake. The smell in the brig really was abominable. "I think I'll use this opportunity to avail myself of the facilities if you don't mind."

She turned her back while he did. The containment pen seemed to have no privacy settings. Apparently even that simple courtesy was beyond Terrans.

"I'm truly sorry about this, captain. If I could get you out of here without arousing suspicion, I would."

Lorca was touched by the concern but shrugged it off as he returned to the central section of the brig. "I've been through worse."

It was hard to imagine what was worse than this. "The Klingons?"

"If you like," said Lorca dismissively. Burnham realized her guess was wrong.

"The Buran," she tried again.

Lorca looked at her calmly. "I know pain, Michael," he said. "I think we both do. Whatever this is..." He gestured at the agony booth. "It doesn't compare to that."

Her parents. He was talking about the death of her parents. Burnham felt a small well of sympathy she had thought buried with the memory of her parents' deaths long ago.

Seeing that sympathy, Lorca smiled. It was good to know, under all that Vulcan nonsense, she was still as human as he was. He treasured that right now, because for a moment, he felt like he was looking at a different Michael Burnham.

Some part of him wanted to reach out, embrace her the way he had embraced the woman whose face she shared, but he knew better. There was no pretending his Michael was anything other than dead and, in more ways than he could express, this Burnham was not her. He was simply grateful that the universe had provided him opportunity to see her again.

"Sir, I have an update on the Defiant files..."

There she was, all-business Burnham. Right on cue. He listened to the update with mild agitation. When she was done, he said, "I know you can do this. Keep at it. The sooner we get those files back to Discovery, the sooner you and I can both get out of here." There was an easy answer to getting the files but he could not tell it to her because, again, how would he explain the knowledge? So many things he could not say.

He stepped back into the agony booth.

"Maybe I can adjust the settings, make it less..."

Lorca smiled and turned away because he did not want her to see the regret in his face. "It's fine. I can take it." Had he looked at her, he would have seen her sympathy a thousand times magnified, and a horrible regret to match his own as she closed the door and turned the booth back on.

The pain made the heartache go away. The pain made everything go away. As he screamed, it even made Burnham go away, because she could not watch the horrible writhing of a man she respected as her captain. Lorca pressed his hands against the walls of the booth and screamed and screamed. There was something freeing in it, in not have to think of anything, of screaming without end.

Besides, some part of him felt he deserved it for failing his Michael Burnham.

* * *

The security chief and guards were in the hall. They wordlessly returned to their posts. Burnham noticed the other prisoners were not waiting in the hall with them. Detmer's voice came over the comms. "We're ready for you in transporter room one, captain."

In the transporter room, Burnham found the brig's three former guests arrayed on the pad like offerings for inspection. Detmer stood at the ready and exchanged a nod of greeting with Burnham.

Detmer spoke to the assembled prisoners. "You are all guilty of malicious thoughts against your emperor. By order of the sovereign Terran Empire, I hereby sentence you to death."

Burnham felt her eyes widen slightly and fought to keep her face impassive as the three figures were enveloped in particles of white streaked with gold. They were being beamed out to space where they would suffocate and freeze in the vacuum. All Burnham's time at the Vulcan Science Academy, fighting to keep her emotions in check around her Vulcan classmates, was being pushed to its limits. She turned from the empty transporter pad and strode out.

Lorca had warned her. Her decency in taking the time to speak with him had been a weakness. Those three crewmen had paid for that weakness with their lives.

* * *

The news of Culber's death took the crew of Discovery by surprise. It was as if the darkness of this universe had infected the ship. The fact that the murder had been perpetrated by Stamets made it even worse.

Sylvia Tilly was still having trouble with this turn of events. Even in his worst moments of delirium, she could not see Stamets as being capable of murdering his own husband and dragging the body down to deck twelve undetected, but apparently that was what had happened. That said something to Tilly. In a very real sense, that person who had stumbled out of the spore chamber after the jump had not been Paul Stamets, and she intended to prove it.

As the ship shifted over to night, Tilly headed to the engineering bay and pulled a canister of spores from the wall. She informed the other engineer in the room she was taking it for a comparative analysis to try and determine if a property variance had caused the universe jump (just in case anyone asked) and proceeded to deck nine.

O'Malley was on the door. He and Larsson were on twelve-and-twelve solo shifts now out of necessity, not that anyone else on the ship really knew or noticed. "Captain," he greeted, displaying the same sort of jaunty irreverence as he had used the first time he met Lorca.

Tilly smiled, glad for a small spot of light in these dark times. "Delivery!"

Normally, the spore delivery was conducted entirely in the security area, but today, Mischkelovitz directed Tilly to bring the spores all the way inside. It did not escape Tilly's notice that Mischkelovitz's nose and eyes were red from recent crying. "You're not going to take them into..." Tilly wondered what to call the crawlspace.

"No need," said Mischkelovitz, gesturing to the security monitors up by the ceiling. "Captain's not on the ship. He won't see." She directed Tilly to put the canister on the table and went to open a wall panel.

Tilly decided to ask now before she lost her nerve. "I've been bringing you a lot of spores. I was wondering if you might be willing to help me with something in return?"

"Okay," said Mischkelovitz, opening a conduit to load the spores into.

The words came flowing out of Tilly like a broken fire hydrant. "The jumps have affected Lieutenant Stamets brain, and ever since the last jump, it's like his brain is stuck and that's what made him kill Dr. Culber, because the Paul Stamets I know would never do anything like that! He injected himself with alien DNA rather than let Ripper suffer, he hates seeing anyone suffer. I need your help to fix him, to make him himself again. Lieutenant Stamets is always saying physics is biology, so I was hoping maybe we could try and make medicine like engineering and fix him that way?"

Mischkelovitz gaped. Tilly winced, knowing her verbal hemorrhage could have that effect on people sometimes, but Mischkelovitz's shock was due to something else. "Hugh is dead?" Her jaw began to tremble. Fresh tears spilled down her cheeks.

"I didn't realize—" Tilly paled. Of course Mischkelovitz did not know. She rarely left her lab and never spoke to anyone on the ship outside the small circle of Lab 26 personnel. Tilly clenched her hands. Mischkelovitz was so jumpy Tilly was not sure if she should try to hug the other woman or not, but standing around doing nothing felt wrong. She tentatively reached over and put a hand on Mischkelovitz's shoulder.

"I'm okay, I'm okay!" went Mischkelovitz, wiping her face furiously. "What happened?"

"They think... they think that he had an episode and ran away and Dr. Culber chased him and Paul... Lieutenant Stamets snapped his neck."

Mischkelovitz's breaths came in rapid, ragged gasps. "They _think?_ "

"That's what Commander Saru told me happened." Tilly gulped. "But Lieutenant Stamets couldn't do something like that! He wouldn't!"

With a series of long, shuddering breaths, Mischkelovitz seemed to get hold of herself. She knew what it was to be blamed for and even responsible for the death of someone you loved through no intentional fault of your own. "Okay," she managed, and nodded. "I'll help."

The spores lay untouched on the table as Mischkelovitz and Tilly went over Stamets' brain scans. The changes to the white matter and cerebral blood flow, suggestions for how to undo or repair the damage in some way, they went over it all. Mischkelovitz managed to explain the neurological processes in ways Tilly could understand clearly, a task which was made more difficult by occasional verbal slip-ups: "mite whatter" instead of "white matter," "teurological nissue" for "neurological tissue." It seemed the more technical Mischkelovitz's words became, the more the letters rearranged themselves.

The conclusion of their assessment was that much of Stamets' brain had been rendered nonfunctional as a result of the structural changes to the organ. Thankfully, the situation was far from hopeless. "You're right," said Mischkelovitz, "it's a ratter of medirecting the pathways, but medical intervention can't do it. He's part of the network. You have to reroute the network."

Tilly's eyes went wide. "Of course!" The network that needed rerouting was the pathways forged by the mycelial link. "The spores changed the structure, they can change it again."

"You just have to be careful to change it to the right structure. Here." Mischkelovitz brought up an earlier brain scan of Stamets; the one Lorca had provided her when she okayed him for that last jump. "You can use this as a template."

Tilly beamed. "Thank you so much, Dr. Mischkelovitz."

Mischkelovitz blinked a few times. "You... you can call me Mischka."

"I can?"

Mischkelovitz nodded rapidly. "It was nice having a partner again. Maybe... maybe if I can find myself here..."

That threw Tilly for a loop. "You want to work with the other you? Isn't she a bad person? It seems like all the people here are... the worst version of us. My doppelganger has killed dozens of people!" Captain Killy had, in fact, killed hundreds, but in this instance, Tilly was referring only to those deaths Killy had performed with her own two hands.

"Maybe," said Mischkelovitz quietly, "but if I could just find me, maybe I can be two people again."

It was tragically sad. Mischkelovitz seemed to think she could replace Milosz with her evil twin. Tilly was not sure what to say to that. "Maybe," she offered after a moment. "Thanks again."

As the doors cycled, Mischkelovitz's odd desire lingered in Tilly's thoughts. She almost forgot O'Malley was outside. Tilly startled when he asked her, "You were in there a while. Everything all right?"

Nothing was all right, but Tilly was starting to feel like it might be better soon. "Uh, yeah! Just... Dr. Mischkelovitz and her husband really had a special connection."

"Oh?" prompted O'Malley. "How d'you know that?"

"They recorded these research logs. It was like..."

O'Malley smiled softly. "Like the same person in two places?"

Tilly was surprised. That described what she had seen perfectly. "Exactly! Did you know Milosz Mischkelovitz?"

"I've known them both since they were eight," said O'Malley, smile deepening into one of genuine affection at the memory.

"You grew up with them?"

O'Malley started to laugh quietly. "Emellia is my sister," he said in proud explanation. "And my favorite person in _two_ universes." That fact suddenly amused him, fraught as it was with the unfortunate nature of their circumstances.

Tilly's eyes went wide as saucers. "I have a million questions!"

O'Malley considered that. As far as crewmembers went, Tilly was right up there with Saru in his estimation. She was amiable, cheerful, intelligent, generous, and kind, but her overly eager nature and willingness to stumble into making mistakes did not make her a very popular person. A bit of an outcast, really. At the beginning of the voyage, she had tried to join the family dinner in the mess hall and they'd turned her away. O'Malley now realized they had done themselves a grave disservice with that action. "Well, I've got nothing but time."

"Really?"

"I mean, I can't promise I'll answer everything, but I'm standing around all night either way."

Though her uniform gave the appearance of Terran scourge Captain Killy, the eager look of excitement on Tilly's face was anything but. "Tell me everything!"

He wouldn't, of course, but he knew enough minor, unincriminating anecdotes to entertain. "So there was this one time, when Mischka was ten..."

* * *

In the morning, Saru and Tilly contacted Burnham for an update on the mission. Saru chose not to inform her of Culber's death. It would only distract Burnham from her task. Besides, there was nothing at this point any of them could do.

Stamets lay strapped down to a medical bed, restraints across his torso, arms, and legs. He was completely immobilized. There was no way he would escape again. His milky-white eyes stared unmoving at the ceiling, only the beeps of the medical monitors signaling that he was still alive.

Tilly hated seeing Stamets in this condition, but Saru was adamant the restraints were needed. "If Lieutenant Stamets killed Culber, he may be a danger to all of us." That Stamets was not the real suspect was a fact known only to a few. Circumstances were bad enough without the crew thinking they had a potential murderer roaming the ship who could freeze time and strike anyone, anywhere. Circumstances were bad enough with everyone thinking Stamets had murdered his husband.

"He only escaped because the containment field was disabled," said Tilly. She had not thought to raise it after seeing Stamets; neither had the nurse. In fairness, it was hard to notice a lack of something in the room, particularly when Stamets had seemed so largely unresponsive. "Culber probably lowered it himself. Who could stand to see the person they love in a cage?"

"Perhaps that was his fatal error," mused Saru. At present, he and Groves were operating under the theory that Stamets had gotten out of sickbay, wandered down to deck twelve, and Culber had tracked him there, encountering Allan. Allan then killed Culber, framed Stamets, and deleted the relevant security footage. The theory was not perfect, there were a lot of questions like why Allan would kill instead of just disappearing as he seemed readily able to, but it was a solid theory.

Tilly's reply was immediate. "Stamets didn't kill anyone."

"Are you suggesting there's a murderer running free on our ship?" asked Saru, concerned. Because Allan had always kept himself on the fringes of everything, never getting directly involved, no one seemed yet to realize his absence. That could surely only last so long.

"No!" exclaimed Tilly. "I'm saying that this... this is not Paul Stamets." She brought up Stamets' brain scan on the nearest display and outlined for Saru the details of her discussion with Mischkelovitz. "This was an unfortunate consequence of an addled mind trying to reach beyond a cloud of confusion. We are losing him, commander, and fast."

"The lieutenant's health it in the hands of our medical officers," said Saru somberly.

"Medicine isn't working! This is a spore issue. Which means no one is more qualified to treat him than I am." Before the mirror universe, such an outburst would have been entirely out of character for Tilly. Some combination of the role she had been forced to assume as Captain Killy and her desperation to save Stamets had combined to produce a forcefulness within her. It surprised her as much as it did Saru. She quickly tempered her outburst with a plea. "Please? Let me bring him back."

As he looked down at Stamets, Saru thought that this was not what Culber would have wanted. "Very well," he said, though some part of him doubted Tilly would be able to succeed where Culber had not. They had to try, at least. For the memory of Hugh Culber.


	79. People They Come Together

A/N: Concludes the events of episode 11, "The Wolf Inside." This doesn't deviate far from the episode so much as add a few small details. Sorry for the excessive retread! There was admittedly a whole scene of new content that was in this chapter originally, but I decided to hold on to it for the moment. It felt too soon for the full details of that particular reveal.

* * *

The second time it was easier to clear the room. There were no other living prisoners. "You can't make a habit of this," Lorca gasped as he sat on the floor of the booth. "They'll suspect."

"I told them I wanted to remind you who put you in here."

She had said this in response to a look from one of the guards when she gave the order, coupled with the words, "Perhaps you would like to be an example of what will happen to Lorca, crewman." The ruse worked entirely. If nothing else, she was securing her reputation as a mercurial danger to everyone on the ship.

Lorca attempted to stand without help but did not entirely succeed. He staggered against the side of the booth and Burnham reached out to steady him.

"Dizzy," he said. "Sat down too fast. It'll pass." Collapsed was more like it. He stood leaning against the wall of the booth, breathing and not looking at her for a minute. Burnham got the impression he was slightly embarrassed, though she could not see why. He had been in the booth more than forty of the last fifty hours and he was much worse for wear at this point. He looked and sounded haggard. His shoulders were hunched, his eyes baggy, his fingers twitchy and his voice unsteady. His arms had been forced into a bent, upwards position for so many hours they were stiff and sore and he had to hold them close to his body to keep them from shaking.

"So," he managed, swallowing on a dry throat. "Have you found a way to move the files?"

"No, sir. We have another problem." The imperial flagship had ordered the ISS Shenzhou to retake its recently vacated position in the Harlak system and eliminate the rebel forces there. More specifically, Terran intelligence had pinpointed the exact location of the base of the rebel leader, a figure as mysterious as the emperor known as Fire Wolf. The Shenzhou was being ordered to wipe everyone out. "I only just managed to avert an orbital bombardment in favor of an infiltration mission."

Lorca did his best not to shake. It was as if both sides of a coin were melting and he could only salvage one. "You have to do it. Give the order. You have to wipe them out."

"But I can't send hundreds of rebels to their death to save myself."

His voice shivered with desperation. "What about your crew, the Federation, our universe, being massacred by Klingons?" This was not Starfleet, where a captain might enjoy a degree of autonomy to interpret orders as he or she saw fit. In the Empire, the emperor's command was law. Lorca managed to find a small reserve of strength as he said, "Sometimes the end justifies terrible means."

"Permission to speak freely, sir?" He blinked an assent, his head barely moving. "I fear that your suffering has influenced your judgment."

She didn't know the half of it, but it felt like a betrayal. The fact she did not trust him hurt worse than all the hours in the booth. He listened to her promise she would find a way to get the files to Discovery, but a way of her own, according to her own principles.

"This Rebellion against the Terrans? It's an unshakable union of species! Klingons, Vulcans, Andorians, Tellarites. It's the closest to a Federation this universe may ever see!"

She had seen it. Some part of him doubted she would, but of course she had. "What's your point," he managed.

"My point is that a Klingon leads the alliance! A _Klingon_."

She thought the participation of the Klingons in the rebellion could inform the war situation back in her universe, that seeing it firsthand could help them work out a way for Starfleet and the Klingons to negotiate, but that was not the thing that struck Lorca as he listened to her.

History was repeating itself right before his eyes. He blinked away the stinging sensation in his eyes. _Michael_. He had to look away. There was an awful sniffling sound from his nose.

"Maybe you're right. Maybe I'm not seeing things clearly." Or maybe he was. Maybe it was right that they were here in this universe, that she was saying these things, things no Terran should ever say. His breath still shuddered but his face took on a look of total resolve and his voice steadied with determination. "But no landing party. You insist that you and Tyler beam down alone. We can't risk our true agenda being exposed." He could not tell her the real reason why, but if the intel was correct that the leadership was down there, there was a chance, however slim, for this to play out in their favor.

He was, however, willing to risk his own agenda being exposed for one momentary, solitary plea he hoped she would obey, even if she ignored his every other order from now until the end of time:

"Hurry back, please."

* * *

As she delved into the issue of Stamets' neural pathology, Tilly began to realize his synapses, many of which seemed to be firing to nowhere, were in fact part of a neuronal link with the mycelial network and every conceivable place it went. The synapses were not firing to nowhere. They were firing to everywhere. Stamets was still dialed in to potential destinations, literally.

She summoned Saru to the engineering lab. "Stamets is inside the network," she explained. "In order to reclaim his lost neural function, we need to put the network inside him."

On paper and in the computer models, her assertions looked sound. There was no disputing the neural scans or the mycelial physics of it. There were also no other plausible options. Stamets lay strapped inside the spore chamber offering no objection to this course of treatment. Saru issued the command. "Proceed, cadet."

As the protocol initiated, Tilly stared at the spore chamber with a fervent hope. The cloud of blue, spore-charged energy seemed to dance across Stamets like electricity. (If she had seen the technology, she might have likened the effect to the yellow-red fire of an agony booth.)

Using Stamets' own neural pattern as a guide, Tilly attempted to merge exotic matter from the mycelial plane into Stamets' brain.

The computer beeped. "His heartrate is accelerating," noted Saru.

"That is, uh, an expected side effect," said Tilly, sounding less than certain. "That big brain of his is doing some heavy lifting."

As they watched on the monitor, the neural patterns began to return to their baselines.

"Remarkable," said Saru. "Your comprehension of the astromycology behind Mr. Stamets' findings is... Oh, I'm impressed."

"Enough that you'll recommend me for the Command Training Program?"

"Enough that if we ever find our way back to a universe that has a Command Training Program, I will consider it," said Saru, lighthearted with optimism at the notion.

Then the alarms began to blare. Stamets' heartrate began to drop. The exertion of the prolonged protocol was having an adverse effect.

"We're nearly there," said Tilly, looking at Stamets and _willing_ him to fight through this and come out the other side. "Come on, Stamets. Come on, come on."

Stamets' head began to jerk from side to side. Tilly attempted to compensate for the affects on Stamets' autonomic nervous system. The alarms kept blaring. More alarms began to blare.

It did not seem to be working. Saru hit the comms, calling for emergency medical assistance.

"No, no, no, no, I'm—I'm administering something to restart his heart!" The alarms blared on insistently. Tilly was frantic—not that she was killing Stamets, but that Saru would stop her from saving him. "If we disengage him from the network now we will lose him altogether!"

And then the calm voice of a medical technician as the monitors flatlined. "We already have. Please stand back."

"Please, Saru, order them to stand down," said Tilly, looking up Saru in a plea to trust her.

But he did not. "Computer, request emergency reaction cube access," said Saru. The chamber opened and the medical officers went inside. They attempted to jolt Stamets' heart back into a functional rhythm. Over and over they tried.

Tilly's jaw trembled and she closed her eyes. _No._ She had been so certain of her success, and instead she had killed someone she cared about. Her shoulders shook as she sobbed quietly, her hands clenching tightly at her sides.

They tried their best, but it was hopeless.

One by one, everyone else in the room filed out. The other engineers in the lab, the medical personnel. Saru was last to go. "I understand if you wish to say goodbye," he told her. "Know that in you he had a good friend. He would be proud of you, cadet." Saru, too, was proud. She had not succeeded, but she had not given up.

It was small comfort as she stood there, staring at Stamets' body still strapped upright in the spore chamber. He looked almost peaceful.

"I'm so sorry. I hope, wherever you are, he's with you."

Then Stamets' head jerked to the side. The monitors began to beep. Tilly ran to them, not believing what she was seeing as one by one Stamets' biofunctions resumed. She returned to the spore chamber, watching as his head twitched further to and fro.

 _Come back, lieutenant_ , she thought furiously at him, and for the first time in days, she felt like maybe he heard her.

* * *

Burnham returned from the planet's surface with new insights into how the rebellion in this universe had united so many disparate species in the face of a common adversary, amazement at her encounter with this universe's version of Sarek, a quantity of soon to be obsolete intelligence on listening stations to prove her mission a success to her Terran crew, and a problem she could not fully explain.

In the midst of her meeting with the rebels—made possible thanks to the surprising support of Sarek—Tyler had begun shouting in Klingon and attacked the Fire Wolf, a Klingon named Voq who lead the alliance of aliens. It had taken all of Sarek's clout with the rebels to prevent Voq from killing both Burnham and Tyler right then and there.

Burnham and Tyler beamed back to the Shenzhou and Burnham barked the order to delay any bombardment until such moment as she commanded it, then ordered Tyler to fall in behind her as she stormed out of the transporter room.

"Tell me the truth. Right now," she demanded, the dim yellow light of what passed for a star in this universe illuminating them against windows of her quarters. "What is happening to you?"

It was then that she learned the too-terrible truth: the man she had known as Ash Tyler, the person she had grown to care for and value and even love over these past months, was in truth a Klingon rendered human in appearance by medical modifications that went far beyond Starfleet's ethical and technological capabilities.

He was her universe's Voq. A human personality engram was layered atop his secretly Klingon mind and had merely been waiting for the proper circumstances to trigger itself. Meeting himself in this mirror realm, hearing the other Voq's words of unity and camaraderie with scores of non-Klingons had been enough to ignite the true nature of Tyler's Klingon heart.

She had brushed away the signs: the occasional vacancies in his eyes, the freeze-ups under pressure, the moments of erratic behavior. She had mistaken them for lingering effects of Klingon prison, thought she could guide him through them like a compass showing him true north, but this entire time she had been offering aid and comfort to a lie.

Ash Tyler was dead. He had been dead for many months now.

One other person had learned this secret on Discovery. Before the mission, a medical examination deep enough to uncover the scar tissue buried within his organs. The ensuing verdict from the lips of the examining doctor: _As far as I'm concerned, you're not you._

And so he had snapped Culber's neck, dragged his body down to deck twelve, and using his access codes as security chief, wiped the footage from the computer.

Burnham's terror rose as she heard this. Tyler-who-was-Voq advanced on her. She drew her phaser in a rapid, smooth motion, held it aloft pointed at his chest. "I don't want to use this," she gasped, and then promised, "I will."

They circled one another, Burnham trying to keep the distance between them, but he knocked the phaser from her hands and pushed her back against the window. She reached towards his neck in the vain hopes of performing a Vulcan neck pinch, but he was prepared for that and grabbed her hand and held it at bay. He spat Klingon words at her as he readied himself for the kill.

And then a pair of hands grabbed Tyler and tossed him towards the door. _Saru_. Not the commander who currently stood as acting captain of the Discovery, but a version of him in this universe that lived as a slave on the Shenzhou. "He made an attempt on the captain's life!" this Saru declared.

The guards from her door disabled Tyler and Burnham gasped and sat there under the window, staring terrified as they dragged Tyler away.

Detmer appeared in the doorway. Burnham immediately pushed her terror aside and rolled to her feet to meet her first officer. "Captain," said Detmer, sounding concerned.

Burnham was firmly calm in response. "I'm fine."

"Understood," said Detmer. "I'll alert the transporter room. Officer's Tyler's swift execution will send a valuable message to the crew."

In that, Burnham suddenly found the glimmer of an idea. It would send a valuable message—to both crews.

* * *

This time there was only one person on the transporter and Burnham did not feel the same regret. Detmer read out the charge of attempted murder and its penalty in this universe: death.

As Burnham strode towards Tyler-who-was-Voq, she looked him straight in the eyes. Those eyes that seemed so perfectly human yet hid so awful a secret. He spoke one last time to her, words in Klingon she did not understand or care about. She only cared about one thing.

She punched her hand against the side of his body, at the space between the padding of the armor he was still wearing from their mission on the planet. Then she personally beamed him out into the vacuum herself.

For a moment, Tyler-who-was-Voq felt the chill that went beyond anything and the swell of the liquids in his body under his skin. His breath ripped from him as he exhaled in soundless scream.

The shimmer of another transporter beam enveloped him. His skin settled back into the normalcy of atmospheric pressure and he sucked in air because there was air again to suck.

He was back on Discovery.

"She should have let me die!" he snarled at Saru. "With honor!"

"No," said Saru, looking at Tyler dispassionately. "We are stranded in a cruel, anarchic world, but we are still Starfleet." He promised Voq a tribunal for the murder of Dr. Culber. Then Saru took the data chip Burnham had dropped into the empty holster hanging at Voq's side. They had the Defiant files at long last.

* * *

Burnham was still cooking up decent excuses as she summoned Lorca to the ready room on the Shenzhou for a "private interrogation" to wash away the stain of the Tyler incident. In fairness, she did want to erase the experience with Tyler, just not in a way the Terrans would understand.

The guards deposited Lorca on the ready room floor and Burnham helped him to the conference table. He could barely walk at this point and was grateful for a chair to sit in and even more so for the glass of water she brought him. His voice was raspy to the point of sandpaper as he requested a status report. It took him two tries just to get that simple question out. The water slipping down his throat did little to settle the hoarseness. It was at the point now where he did not scream in the agony booth, merely rasped wordlessly while inside it, his capacity for screams long gone. Even if he wound up standing in his own piss later, it was worth it to sit here feeling the taste of water on his dry, cracked lips again.

Burnham briefed Lorca on her diplomacy with the rebels first because that was easier. The mind meld with Sarek that established her honesty, the discussion with Voq about Klingon nature.

Then she told him about Tyler.

To call it a shock was an understatement. To think the Klingons in her universe had that kind of technology terrified Lorca. Worse still was the realization he had brought that monster into her life. He had liked that monster, even looked at it as something of a son, and that monster had hurt Burnham in an unforgivable way and he was responsible for it.

Both he and Cornwell had been entirely wrong about Ash Tyler. Cornwell's PTSD theory was well and truly shattered. So, too, was Lorca's thought process: having survived so much torture himself, Lorca had thought Tyler similarly resilient. As he sat looking at Burnham staring brokenly into the distance, he realized he had overestimated the ability of humans from her universe to handle such torments. They were like children compared to Terrans in this regard and unlike Terran children, they did not grow up playing with agonizers and dancing with pain until such moves became an instinctual ballet.

"I'm sorry," he told her. She scarcely seemed to register the apology.

As far as Burnham was concerned, they had now secured everything they had come for and only one task remained. "We need to leave this place," she said.

"Not yet," he replied. There were too many what ifs, he told her. What if Saru could not isolate the data? What if the Defiant's route between the worlds would not work for Discovery? They would need somewhere to run, somewhere to continue to exist in this world if the other world was lost to them.

She sat down beside him, silent at the realization he was right about their likelihood of escape even with the Defiant files. That no Terran ships had breached their way into the other universe seemed to indicate the Defiant's trip might have been one-way, and their own the same. It was an angle she had not wanted to consider. So many things she had failed to consider.

Normally, Burnham would have objected to some point Lorca was making or at the very least chimed in with thoughts of her own, but she was clearly still reeling from Tyler's betrayal in ways she was having trouble processing. As much as Lorca sort of hated all-business Burnham, he would have found her a comfort right now in the place of this despondency.

"Look, I know this is hard for you," said Lorca. "I know you'd... come to care for... Tyler." The name came spitting out with a repulsive disdain.

Burnham's reply was barely more than a whisper. "I don't think I can survive this place alone."

"You're not alone, Michael." He reached over and put his hand on hers in reassurance and in promise. "We will survive this place. Together."

She had no idea how not alone she was. In retelling her encounter with Sarek, she had revealed more than she knew. _He melded his mind to mine and then he said he saw a world bursting with potential._

A world bursting with potential.

Those, Lorca knew, were not Sarek's words. They were Michael Burnham's. It was no secret where Sarek had heard them.

 _My mind to your mind. My thoughts to your thoughts._

The bridge comm activated in alarm. It was Detmer reporting a massive power signature in orbit around the planet. Another Terran ship had arrived to dole out the bombardment orders Burnham had refused to carry out in a timely fashion.

"The rebels haven't completed their evacuation," exclaimed Burnham, tearing out of the room.

Nor would they. The orbital barrage had already started. The pops of the impacts shook the Shenzhou's frame in a familiar sound.

A guard came into the ready room so quickly Lorca only barely managed to get the restraints back on his wrists to maintain Burnham's charade. The guard pulled him out onto the bridge.

The torpedoes were planet-rippers, a special class of munitions designed to fragment whole swathes of a planet's crust in a burst of volcanic activity, rendering a once-habitable surface into a sea of fire. Lorca and the other bridge crew squinted and shielded their eyes at the flashes of light. Burnham stared straight at it, horrified.

"Incoming transmission," reported an officer.

"It's the emperor," chimed in another.

The holocomm flickered into view. The face and voice were entirely too familiar.

"Captain Michael Burnham. You've been away too long. Though I can't say the same for your prisoner."

Burnham stared unbreathing as the crew around her pounded their fists against their chests in salute. She could not believe what she was seeing. It was more than a ghost, it was the specter of everything that was wrong in two universes. As Burnham looked into the face of someone she had loved and lost, she could barely process the sight.

Yet there the emperor stood, resplendent in her golden armor and with a long caped jacket trailing after her, her every syllable a condemnation of Burnham's inaction against the planet. "When I give an order I do not expect to be ignored."

Still Burnham stared, confused and hurt and a thousand million other things at the impossible truth of the face she was seeing.

"Don't you bow before your emperor?"

Never in her life did Burnham expect to hear such words spoken in the voice of her mentor, Philippa Georgiou.

She had looked for Georgiou at the onset of this nightmare and found no trace of her former captain. At the time, it seemed a relief, especially in light of Major Allan's comment. Some part of her had thought maybe Georgiou, like Allan, might simply prove to be too immutably good for this dark world. Not so. Georgiou had been right in front of her the whole time. Now, Emperor Georgiou was literally so.

As Lorca looked at that same face, he could not repress the smirk pulling at his mouth. The time had come to fulfill his final promise to Michael Burnham.


	80. People They Fall Apart

A/N: I now take the stage with my baton, the orchestra fully assembled, every instrument in position, and the music begins to play.

Begins the events of episode 12, "Vaulting Ambition." (Small nitpick note, I did skip/fast forward some of the whole figuring out the Tyler/Voq thing for brevity's sake; this is not the Ash Tyler fanfic you're looking for. I have no time to dwell on that plot. And while I dearly love Stamets and Culber, we're also not here to dwell in the mushroom forest.)

In other news, I'm going to print a copy of this story in bound book format for my own personal amusement. If anyone wants to offer a "book review blurb"-style quote, please do a comment or message! I'd love some quotes to put on the back cover. My goal is to send to print on April 9.

To be clear, I'm not selling this fanfic or anything in any way, shape, or form. It's just, I've written a novel-length work (two novels, really) and I want to hold it in my hands as a real book.

* * *

The ISS Charon, flagship of the Terran Empire and nomadic palace of the emperor, did not linger to admire its handiwork above the planet Harlak. It was a warp-capable fortress of unparalleled firepower and destruction entirely equal the Klingon Sarcophagus of the other universe. Like that ship, which Lorca had enjoyed demolishing, it was an incredibly attractive target to the rebels lingering in the area. While the evacuation of Harlak had not been entirely completed, enough rebels had escaped to pose a credible threat to the flagship if it lingered.

Georgiou left Burnham and the Shenzhou with the strictest orders to finish mopping up any straggling refugees from the planet as the Charon withdrew to more defensible coordinates. Burnham and Lorca were to follow once the Shenzhou's cleanup efforts were complete.

Burnham could ill afford any more indulgences with Lorca when the emperor's summons was hanging over their heads. "See to it that he's ready for transport immediately," she ordered.

As the guards dragged him towards whatever they thought this order meant (probably the waiting agony booth), Lorca shouted at Burnham and the rest of the bridge, "You're all a bunch of lab rats in the emperor's maze. Lab rats!"

Burnham did not know what it meant, only that Lorca was trying to tell her to relay some message. She undertook the task of performing a cursory sweep of the planet for rebels, doing her best to avoid actually finding any, but three small craft were not sufficiently quick or smart to evade detection and Burnham was forced to watch as Detmer fired on them with disinterested efficiency.

While she sat through this display, a transmission arrived from Discovery. Burnham took it in the ready room. It was the Defiant files. Discovery had gotten past the firewall and decrypted the data. Minus the Terran computer security measures, the files turned out to be very small indeed and almost entirely redacted, but that did not make them useless. There was data enough to start theorizing.

There was also just enough time before they boarded the shuttle for her to send a transmission back to Discovery. It was a small, terse, seemingly innocuous message. "Discovery. Thank you for your assistance in bringing the traitor to heel. The emperor has summoned us to an audience. I will be sure to tell the emperor personally of your role in my success when we speak. Whether as a prisoner or a lab rat, Lorca will pay for his crimes." She hoped that was sufficient to convey whatever message Lorca intended by the words.

* * *

The lab rat received the message. She sat in her room monitoring the bridge and communications, eyes glinting in the dim warmth, fur wriggling in excitement. Even if the words were spoken by Burnham, she knew they came from Lorca. She pressed the button for the comms. "Einar," she said, "it is time."

Groves and Mischkelovitz were in the lab proper. In a sense, they were beset on two sides. As Lalana emerged from the back of the lab with her silvery color-changing thermal suit in hand, Larsson came in the front. "What are you doing in here?" Groves demanded of Larsson, to which Lalana said:

"Einar and I have very much enjoyed our time with you both, but we are now required elsewhere." She elected to speak for Larsson, but if she were being honest about it, Larsson had not enjoyed his time with Groves and Mischkelovitz particularly. He found them only marginally tolerable.

Groves had been relaxing with his feet up and brought them down at once. "Say what now?" He should have been in Lorca's study attending to the Allan issue of how to trap and kill a probable time traveler who might or might not still be on the ship, but he had opted to work on decrypting the Defiant files in a more familiar setting because Lorca's collection of armaments creeped him out and now he was just avoiding the murder-themed mancave until such a time as Saru called him back. Besides, he and Airiam had been remotely working on decrypting the files together and had gotten a rather good game of chess going in the aftermath.

(Owing to her inhuman appearance, Lieutenant Commander Airiam had been banned from her post on the bridge and Groves was entirely sympathetic to her ensuing boredom. There was no room for either of them in this universe. What passed for law here was barely recognizable to Groves and if ever there was a place that rendered bioethics obsolete, it was a universe where humans were as almost cruel to each other as they were to the aliens they viewed as inferior life forms.)

Mischkelovitz did not look up from the mess of circuitry she was working on. She asked, "Where are you going?" Her flat tone suggested she was only mildly interested in the answer. Whatever research use she had for Lalana was over with and done with. The only reason Lalana was still in the lab was the mistaken idea that Mischkelovitz's current active projects included the lului box in some capacity. That was the secret she and Lalana shared. There had never been a need for the lului box. Or rather, there had been a need, and the need had been getting Lorca to go to Memory Alpha.

"We are going to join the captain," said Lalana, stretching up and gripping the edge of the worktable.

Mischkelovitz went from minimal to excessive interest in the space of a nanosecond. She put down the microwelder in her hands and turned to face them with eyes bright and eager. "Can I come?"

"Apologies, Emellia, but that is not possible."

"Well," said Groves, putting his feet back up and returning to the chess game on his padd, "have fun. It's your funeral."

"What do you mean, funeral?" asked Mischkelovitz.

"Your brother is being dramatic," intoned Larsson humorlessly.

"Am I, though? This whole universe is goddamn deathtrap. Dr. Culber already paid that price."

"Dr. Culber was killed by Ash Tyler," said Larsson, leaning against the worktable and crossing his arms. Maybe he did not have Groves' intelligence, but he was far too big to be intimidated by anything about Groves. He also looked even bigger than usual in his Terran armor. "Or whatever he is. And he came from our world. Honestly, I don't think the universes are as different as everyone seems to think. There are murderers in both."

"This universe is ruled by a fascist tyrant and you don't see the difference?"

"Fascism and tyranny have existed in our world as well. That is why we have words for them. Humans are humans, and they are always capable of bad as much as they are good."

Lalana tapped her top fingers on the worktable in a manner that seemed thoughtful. "I thought you were a moral relativist, John?" she pointed out.

There was a blank look on Groves' face. He had considered himself exactly that until arriving in a universe where the moral relativity broke his concept of the scale. Reading through the files on the data core recovered from the debris field revealed atrocities beyond comprehension. Now he did not know what he was, only that the darkness permeating this universe was something he outright rejected.

"In any event, if we are to die, it was a pleasure to know you both," offered Lalana. "Please also give my regards to Macarius. Einar, if you will assist me?"

While Larsson gave Lalana a hand with her garment and Mischkelovitz whimpered about not wanting Lalana to die, Groves picked up his padd and tried to focus on the chess game. He could not. He stared at the pieces on the black and green board and finally dumped the padd onto the table. "Groves to O'Malley. You up, moron?"

"Good afternoon to you, too," came the acid response. The eye roll felt almost audible.

"You might want to come down here. You're about to lose the rest of your staff."

A minute later O'Malley was on site with a cup of coffee and, of all the incongruities, a powdered donut in his other hand. Mischkelovitz took one look, snatched the donut from him, and broke it in half.

"What the hell do you think you're doing!" O'Malley went, entirely not caring about the donut. (Mischkelovitz put half the donut back in O'Malley's hand, broke off a piece of her half and gave it to Lalana, and began to eat the portion she had claimed for herself. Powder coated her fingers. It did not show against the medical white of her uniform.)

"Got a mission," said Larsson.

"Like hell you do!"

"Captain's orders."

"Oh, Saru ordered you on a mission without asking or telling me?"

"Lorca." Actually, Lorca had not ordered Larsson to do anything, but it was believable enough that he might have and not said a single word to O'Malley.

"You don't answer to Lorca! You answer to me!"

"I resign," said Larsson, carrying through on his perennial threat yet again. "Now I don't listen to anyone."

O'Malley stared indignantly. "I don't accept your resignation."

Lalana hopped between Larsson and O'Malley. She still had her filaments tucked inside her jumpsuit so she looked like a silvery bullet with a blue-grey head sticking out. "If I may point out, now that I am leaving, there is no need for your extra security measures, so Einar is free to resign."

"Wait, you're going, too?" O'Malley suddenly noticed Lalana was wearing _clothing_.

"Captain Lorca requires my presence," was her only explanation.

O'Malley shook his head. Children, all of them. "You understand you're not the sole reason for the security here, right? There's valuable research in this lab." Mischkelovitz's eyes went wide at O'Malley's words. Her brother didn't know the half of it. She shrank back towards her desk and debated going into the crawlspace.

"There is valuable research everywhere on Discovery," said Lalana. "I was the only thing that was secret about this room. Now this room is like all the others and may be guarded exactly the same way. But since you are here, allow me to say this in person. In the event we do not survive our journey, it has been a pleasure knowing you, Mac." She even did him the kindness of not calling him his full first name.

There was a horrible silence as that sank in. "Why... where..."

"Do not worry," Lalana said. "I have lived a very long time compared to you and Einar and I are not afraid of this eventuality. We will of course endeavor to avoid it, but there is no need for concern if this should come to pass. We are glad for the time we have known you. That we met at all in the vast cosmos was such an unlikelihood it is what you would describe as a miracle. A thousand million tiny things had to go exactly right for us to meet all of you and they did. Please do not cry, Emellia. Think of us in this moment always, as your friends. Now come, Einar, our shuttle awaits."

They made as if to leave. "Hold on!" said Groves suddenly, his feet coming down off the table again. "You're flying a shuttle in?" That was, he knew, an absolutely, completely _terrible_ idea because even if the shuttles were mocked up to look Terran, they did not have valid Terran transponders and security ident codes and if the Defiant files were any indication as to the sorts of security measures Terrans employed, that shuttle was going get blown out of space the moment it got near the Charon. It would not hold up to any sort of scrutiny. "Let me give you a pineapple."

"Thank you, but I just ate," said Lalana, referring to the piece of donut. "Perhaps Einar is hungry?"

The word seemed to mean something different to Groves and O'Malley than it did Lalana and Larsson. O'Malley's eyebrows shot up. "Is a pineapple an option?"

"Of course," said Groves. "Why wouldn't it be?"

"Well, I don't know, we're in a different universe, aren't there different rules of physics or something?" The light here really did seem strange.

"No, you moron, the quantum variance here doesn't invalidate pineapples." The point at which changes in physics would break a pineapple was also potentially a point at which reality was collapsing and there were bigger problems to worry over.

"Well, then, by all means," said O'Malley, and smiled at Groves. "I do so love pineapples, they're my favorite fruit."

Groves grinned back a grin stretched so wide it threatened to turn into a laugh. "One pineapple, coming right up!"

"I don't understand. How is fruit going to help?" asked Larsson.

"Oh, you'll see," promised O'Malley as Groves and Mischkelovitz began to gather materials from around the lab.

Lalana hopped onto an unused table on the far wall. She loved watching things happening and it was a very nice vantage point.

* * *

The sweep of the rebels was done. Burnham sat at the shuttle controls as it left the Shenzhou's shuttlebay and tried not to focus on the fact they were about to fly towards the worst possible reality she could have imagined.

Luckily, she had a small but encouraging distraction on hand. She joined Lorca in the rear of the shuttle as the autopilot took over and showed him the Defiant's data. "The file has been redacted, but there is some data on how the Defiant crossed into this universe. A phenomenon called interphasic space, but where that space is, the exact coordinates? Struck from the record."

She had to put the padd in his hands for him; he was almost entirely restrained for this little transport exercise and his fingers and head were about the only parts of him that could move. "All right, well, we'll just have to hunt down the original report. If the complete archive's anywhere it'll be in the Imperial Palace which is..." Lorca inhaled. "Fortunately where we've been summoned. Some people would see that glass as half full." He smiled at Burnham. Right now it felt a little like his cup was running over.

Burnham did not smile back. She was having trouble understanding how anyone could still find anything to smile about at this point. Between Tyler and Georgiou, she had lost what limited capacity she had for that expression of human joy.

She had, at least, brought him a nerve dampener to counteract the worst effects of the agonizers. She injected it and he reached out and put a hand on her arm, the only part of her he could reasonably reach in the restraints.

"Listen to me. You'll get the data we need on the Defiant and you'll get us out of there. I know you will." His face was so earnest, so sincere, so _hopeful_. He had confidence in her.

She couldn't look at him. Whatever Lorca thought he saw in her, she no longer saw in herself. She darted away towards the front of the shuttle.

"Burnham!" he called after her. Guilty, she looked back. "I need you. _You_ need you. What are you afraid of?" There was a comfort in his tone, an easiness that went against everything Burnham was feeling.

The insignia badge of her beloved captain found its way into Burnham's hands. Its surface was crisscrossed with ugly scratches. It was the only connection she still had to the person she had been before the Binary Stars.

Those scratches were her fault. Everything, it seemed, was her fault. Yet for some reason Lorca had the gall to still look at her and see some sort of potential.

"Georgiou," she admitted. "Logic tells me she's not the woman that I betrayed. But this feels like a reckoning."

"Your Georgiou is dead," Lorca reminded her, voice taut.

"Haven't you ever been afraid of a ghost?"

He did not fear his ghost, he lived for her. She was less a ghost and more an impossible dream to live up to. A miraculous dream at that.

As the warp drive disengaged, the light of the Charon's massive energy core made Lorca wince and turn away from Burnham. She, of course, turned right towards the light. It did not hurt her eyes to see it. She slipped Georgiou's badge back into her pocket.

They would be docked in a moment and she had one lingering question.

"What did you mean on the bridge when you referred to lab rats?"

For a moment, Lorca worried Burnham had not understood his intent. "Did you pass the message on?"

"I did."

He sat in somber silence a moment. "Just letting someone on Discovery know not to worry, I'll be home soon enough."

"Dr. Mischkelovitz?" The code had been obvious when she thought about it. Lorca was known to frequent Mischkelovitz's lab, a lab Mischkelovitz rarely left, and _miš_ was the root sound for the word "mouse" in most Slavic languages.

"Very perceptive," said Lorca, choosing not to correct Burnham. So many times now she had tried and failed to guess at his motives and feelings. He could not recall a single time Burnham had guessed right. From accusing him of biological weapons manufacture to the Ripper situation to this very moment. All these months and she still didn't know him. Let her think she did, though. Let her think whatever it took to get them both through this.

As the shuttle came to a rest in the bay, Burnham thought it unfortunate that Lorca might have a connection of a romantic nature with Mischkelovitz. Not only did she know from Tilly that Mischkelovitz had severe social issues and was probably easily taken advantage of by someone with Lorca's charisma, Mischkelovitz was only three years older than Burnham. Lorca was old enough to have fathered either of them. Throw in the imbalance of power between captain and junior crew and it was exactly the sort of thing Captain Georgiou had warned Burnham about.

The shuttle doors opened. Burnham shoved aside her grief and strode out with a veneer of savage confidence, barking orders at the shuttlebay crew to attend to her prisoner and not keep the emperor waiting. Lorca stumbled out behind her, the emperor's guards pushing and shoving him every chance they got.

Neither of them noticed a tiny piece of debris left in the shuttle. It had fallen out of Burnham's pocket when she pulled out Georgiou's rank insignia during the trip. A tiny slip of paper with the words "You will be called to fill a position of honor and responsibility" printed on it.

* * *

Saru found himself running into more problems than he could ever have anticipated.

Lieutenant Stamets was slowly improving but he wasn't out of the woods yet. The unfortunate truth was that he was still in a coma. Tilly remained tirelessly optimistic, insisting something positive was happening in Stamets' head, but whatever it was, it was not happening fast enough to get them out of this terrible situation.

The monster that was both Ash Tyler and Voq was having a medical emergency. Now that both sides of his consciousness were awake—the native Klingon personality and the human one that had been forced on top of it—his brainwaves were in a state of chaos. One moment he was Voq, the next Tyler. At this rate, there would be no tribunal, there would be no anything, because whatever was laying in sickbay was going to die.

Even if that person in sickbay was entirely not Ash Tyler, Saru had no intention of seeing anyone else die on his watch.

Then, because all of that was not enough, a message from Owosekun on the bridge: "Captain, did you authorize a shuttle launch?"

"I most certainly did not!"

Operating as captain without being on the bridge was proving to be a disaster. Saru turned to the nearest wall console in the corridor outside the medical bay. "Who is aboard? Open a channel!" The channel opened, audio only. "Shuttlecraft, identify yourself!"

"Sorry, captain, tried to give you a heads up, but your hands were full in sickbay."

Saru recognized the voice. "Lieutenant Larsson, return to the shuttlebay immediately."

"No can do. We're already running late. That fruit delivery cost us precious time."

What that meant, Saru was not sure. Then he realized it was human humor. The sort of humor Lorca often employed to diffuse high-stress situations. Saru would never understand that instinct. "What do you think you are doing?"

"Secret mission. You-know-who's orders."

"Lieutenant, if you do not return that shuttlecraft immediately, we will be forced to open fire." At the tactical console, Rhys armed the phasers in preparation. The action was pointless. Saru could not bring himself to command the phasers used against a fellow Starfleet officer, not in light of his determination to get everyone from their universe home alive.

"Ah, right, you haven't heard! I resigned from Starfleet. Again."

Or, for that matter, against a self-declared civilian, even one in the process of a stealing a ship.

"Beam him off," said Saru sharply.

"I can't get a lock," said Owosekun over the comm. "It's like his life sign is only partly there."

Saru realized what was happening. Larsson's usage of the plural "we." A single, unlockable life sign. Lalana was on that shuttle. It even explained that strange mention of "lab rat" in Burnham's last message.

"Love to stay and chat," said Larsson, "but my friend and I have an appointment to keep. Wish us luck!"

The channel closed. Saru stared at the emptiness on the monitor. The bridge was still waiting for orders. "Captain, do you want us to pursue?"

Saru wavered a moment. What was the right course of action here?

"Captain?"

The answer came. "No. Maintain our present position and resume standing orders."

"Aye, sir."

The next command was to open a comm to O'Malley, whose explanation was as unhelpful as it was clarifying. "They have left on the command of Captain Lorca?" Saru echoed.

"That's what they both said. Obviously, I had no idea you were as clueless as me."

"You might have told me Larsson had resigned his commission," Saru noted.

"Honestly, Saru, he says that twice a week. It's always been an empty threat."

"I am presently your captain," Saru corrected O'Malley.

"Yes, captain," said O'Malley without hesitation or resentment. "I'm afraid that's all the information I have."

Saru let O'Malley go and stood in the corridor deep in thought. He was not certain whether he had just made a mistake or not. That shuttlecraft was a risk they could ill-afford, but Burnham had not been in contact since that last cryptic message, so perhaps this was some sort of special contingency Lorca had devised in case of trouble. Were there other sleeper agents in among the crew, waiting for cryptic turns of phrase to rush out and execute other secret orders? Most likely not, but given Lorca had not informed Saru as to Lalana and Larsson's operation, there was a nonzero chance of something like this happening again.

In Lab 26, O'Malley and Groves exchanged a look. "Do not tell him about the pineapple," O'Malley said, white as a sheet.

Groves held his hands up and shook his head repeatedly. He had no words. Either they had just assisted in the execution of some sort of top secret orders or they had unknowingly aided and abetted a pair of transdimensional fugitives. Possibly somehow both.

Eventually, Groves did find words again. True to form, they were an indictment of O'Malley. "I'd just like to point out, where your staff is concerned, you are oh-for-two, Mac."

"Shut up, John," said O'Malley, but he was thinking the same. He felt like a failure. He had not technically chosen Larsson or Allan, but he was responsible for them and both had disappeared under questionable circumstances on his watch and now he was left holding the bill for their actions. In every conceivable way possible he had proven inadequate as a leader.

Then again, he had always known he was a follower in every aspect of his life. If only he had possessed the guts to stand up to Cornwell when she offered him this assignment. He always did what everybody else wanted. No wonder everyone thought him such a fool.

As he stood there thinking this, he heard the most familiar words he knew manifest in the room: "I love you, Mally." It was, as always, an attempt to cheer him from a morose moment.

"Just as much," he answered, voice hollow and automatic.

* * *

Burnham was left reeling in the aftermath of her audience with the emperor. The way Georgiou had beaten Lorca when he refused to bow to her, the promise of enduring torture for the stubbornly defiant captain, both of these things had been expected but still shocked her.

What she had not anticipated was the pure, unbridled confusion that followed when the emperor stepped forward and expressed her _happiness_ at Burnham's return, eliciting applause from the assembly of Terran officers and bureaucrats around them. Georgiou had touched her hand to Burnham's cheek and spoken words that still echoed in Burnham's mind:

"Everything will be the way it was, _dear daughter_."


	81. Pineapple Surprise

A/N: Continues with episode 12, "Vaulting Ambition."

By the way, the pineapple is based on a WiFi Pineapple, which is a real thing fellow viewers of HBO's Silicon Valley will be familiar with. That it also happens to be Malcolm Reed's favorite food is just the most lovely coincidence you could ask for.

* * *

The pineapple was not edible, even from Lalana's rather broad perspective on the subject. It was a device a bit bigger than a basketball assembled from various communications components that Groves explained as a "system Trojan horse that hijacks transmissions, grabs security and access codes as it passes them along, and gives them to you."

It was also a complete and utter mess. Whatever Groves' skills, fabrication was not among them. Parts were taped together and fragile antennae jutted out at potentially risky angles. Because Groves had assembled it in his lap instead of on a flat surface, it did not lay flat and was in constant danger of rolling around and breaking, so Lalana sat with it in the copilot seat, her tail holding it still.

Amazingly, it had passed its first test already. No one had authorized the shuttle launch on Discovery. The pineapple had bypassed the normal systems protocols entirely. Not that this meant anything. Compared to Terran security protocols, Discovery's systems were virtually unguarded, even with the upgrades installed after the Mudd incident.

Larsson was in the pilot's seat, tapping his finger on the dash in nervousness. While there was no risk of him running into his doppelganger, if anyone recognized him, he would probably end up just as dead. The main point in his favor was that, in both this universe and the one they had come from, he had never made much of a name for himself. He was forty-five years old, a bachelor, and had stalled out at the rank of lieutenant. All his shipmates were dead twice over and since they were most of the people he knew in his universe, it stood to reason the situation was much the same here.

Still. He was also a six-foot-four Swede, so those people who did meet him tended to remember it. "If we don't survive this..."

"We are going to survive this," said Lalana.

Larsson looked at her with an annoyed expression that said it was his turn to talk. "I'm just saying. If we don't survive this, same thing you said to those idiots. It's been a pleasure."

Lalana clicked her tongue. "Emellia is one of the smartest humans in Starfleet."

"Yes, well, someone who needs help putting her uniform on straight is an idiot in all the ways that count," said Larsson. Lalana's tongue clicks sped up to a rapid flurry. It was as true now as it had been when they first met nine years ago: Larsson was not a nice person, but Lalana liked that about him. The shuttle beeped. "Ah, security checkpoint. Time to find out if that thing's worth its weight in anything."

Some lights flashed on the pineapple. A comm channel opened. "Discovery shuttlecraft, transmitting encrypted coordinates. Engage your autopilot."

"Copy," said Larsson, and closed the channel. He sat back in his seat. "Unbelievable. It worked."

"Did you think it would not? John is almost as smart as Emellia."

After bunking with Groves for the better part of seven months, Larsson's impression was that Groves spent all of his time playing games. The fact he had any usefully-developed skills whatsoever came as something of a surprise. Larsson gestured at the pineapple. "Lalana, look at that thing. Did you think it was going to work!?"

"Nnnn," hummed Lalana dubiously, which was her way of avoiding answering.

They sat in silence. The shuttle beeped again, this time to alert them they were arriving. They dropped out of warp as Burnham's shuttle had half an hour earlier and beheld the Charon in all its glory.

Seeing the giant sphere of orange energy that powered the Charon, Larsson swore in Swedish. "What the hell is that?"

Lalana stared at it with unblinking eyes. She recognized the particles. "Mushrooms," she said.

"Why is everything food," grumbled Larsson. And all of it inedible at that.

Lalana and the pineapple went into the waiting crate, as usual, alongside a phaser set to stun, but when Larsson went to close the crate, Lalana stopped him with her tail on his arm. "Did you notice the captain changed after the Buran?"

"What?" There wasn't time for this. "Changed how?"

"If you have to ask, you did not notice," said Lalana cryptically and withdrew her tail. Larsson closed the crate.

Maybe the captain had changed after the Buran, but so had Larsson. He had lost most of the people he considered friends when it went down. Kerrigan, Arzo, even Morita and Yoon. The universe seemed so much colder in the aftermath of that tragedy.

Some part of Larsson felt he should have died with them. Knowing that he had done so in this universe was both a comfort and a reinforcement of this fact. As far as he was concerned, he owed Lalana his life, such as it was, because that one little history project had changed the course of his fate.

Larsson was standing at the ready when the shuttle touched down and the door opened. The dockworker who approached glared and demanded to know the purpose of Larsson's visit and the nature of his cargo.

"Delivery," said Larsson. "Cargo's above my security clearance, so I assume it's above yours. Now show me where I can find Macarius O'Malley to deliver this thing and make it fast. If Captain Killy hears that you kept me waiting, god help us both."

It worked. Even on the almighty imperial flagship, everyone knew and feared this universe's Sylvia Tilly.

* * *

There remained a Klingon prisoner in Discovery's brig.

Her name was L'Rell. She had been at the Battle of the Binary Stars as a follower of T'Kuvma, the original master of the now-vanquished Sarcophagus, whose vision of a united Klingon Empire she shared. When Michael Burnham had fired the phaser that claimed T'Kuvma's life, L'Rell had clung to that vision as fervently as she did T'Kuvma's chosen successor, the albino outcast Voq, Son of None.

Voq represented everything T'Kuvma envisioned. A warrior of great strength and honor, he had risen to his position not because of any politics or impressive bloodline, but on sheer merit. That was what made T'Kuvma such a visionary: that he would ignore the house of one's birth and judge you by your own worth. That was a foundation for a strong empire.

But when T'Kuvma fell, the other Klingon houses refused to follow Voq. They listened to T'Kuvma only out of regard for his noble origins and Voq did not share this illustrious birthright. The other houses did not see a war with the Federation as a cause for unification but as an opportunity for personal glory. Kill the Starfleet scum not because Starfleet's malodorous ethos stood counter to everything that was pure and Klingon, but because doing so grew your personal renown as a warrior and increased the repute of your house.

As the turmoil of the disparate houses consumed them all, Kol of House Kor had seized the opportunity to fill the power vacuum with a vision of his own, a vision of himself and his own house's greatness. He was a factionalist through and through and his rise was a guarantee that outcasts like Voq would never be seen as worthy or equal, that strength and power would be forever tied to the blood of your parents.

There was nothing she or Voq could do to stop Kol.

So L'Rell had pledged herself to Kol and stood beside him, said the words Kol wanted to hear, and took on the role he assigned for her. Torturer, warden, shepherd of the war prisoners. In this task she had learned the true depth of human wretchedness. Rather than stand proud and tall and die in battle, humans would scurry and cling to life by any means possible, like vermin. They did not possess the sort of honor that lived in the hearts of all true Klingons.

She spoke the words of allegiance to Kol, but in her heart, she followed Voq. With him she hatched a plan to destroy Starfleet from within, avenge T'Kuvma, and put Kol in his place.

She harvested the DNA of Ash Tyler and used it to reconstruct Voq in Tyler's image. She harvested the mind of Ash Tyler and used it to craft the perfect disguise—a disguise that was perfect because it was not a disguise at all. For all intents and purposes, there was no Voq. There was only Tyler, oblivious to his own true nature.

When they captured the captain of Discovery, it was no accident that he found himself imprisoned in the same room as her creation. Their subsequent escape was also no accident. L'Rell waited to hear from Voq again with news that would assist them in completing their ultimate aims.

No news came. Weeks turned to months. She realized Voq was lost and began to search for a way to escape Kol.

Kol brought her a Starfleet admiral to interrogate and she saw an opportunity. With a prisoner of such high rank and value, she could defect. Even if the Federation represented everything she hated, she could not stand by and watch Kol poison what she loved from the inside. The admiral, Cornwell, was amenable to the defection, coupled as it was with her own escape.

But Kol discovered L'Rell's quiet disloyalty and locked her up alongside Cornwell. It seemed like the end had finally come.

Until in walked Burnham and _Tyler_ , come to rescue Cornwell. L'Rell looked at Tyler and spoke the words that should have awoken Voq within him.

The words did not work. Her carefully-planted trigger failed. Tyler remained Tyler, and in Tyler's mind, which contained only confusing flashes of what she and Voq had shared, she was a rapist and a torturer who had used him in deplorable ways.

Beset by terrible prospects at every turn, L'Rell took hold of Cornwell as the humans and Voq beamed away in a last, desperate bid to escape.

She had been locked up in Discovery's brig ever since.

As Saru stood in front of her cell, L'Rell learned the ultimate outcome of her long machinations. Voq, her paragon of true Klingon virtue, her leader and her love, was now irreversibly broken.

And she had done this to him. Her trigger words had not worked properly, but they had worked on some level. The two psyches held within Voq's grey matter were now locked in a battle that threatened to destroy them both.

Saru sought to remedy this. "I do not know where your Voq ends and our Tyler begins, but they are both in jeopardy. The question is, will you ease their pain?"

He beamed Tyler into her cell. He was barely conscious and covered in self-inflicted wounds. L'Rell clung to him, appalled at this pathetic thing in her arms, appalled at herself for turning Voq into this.

"It can be undone!" she wailed. "But only my hands can tend to him."

As she sought to undo her terrible achievement in Discovery's sickbay, she could hear Voq ranting in barely-coherent Klingon, reciting bits and pieces of Klingon scripture. It was impossible, she realized. She could not shed Tyler's mind from Voq's. She could only quiet them together.

She did so. Voq switched to the voice of Ash Tyler and called for Burnham and spoke Klingon no more. In that moment, L'Rell knew she would never see or hear Voq again. She let out a wail of grief and fury.

* * *

Commander Macarius O'Malley, Imperial interrogator, answered the door to his workshop with a scowl and found himself dwarfed by a giant of a man carrying a large crate and accompanied by an Imperial guard wearing docks livery. "What!" he shouted at them both.

"Delivery from the Discovery," said Larsson. "Captain Tilly asked me to bring it to you personally. Where would you like me to put it?"

O'Malley stared at the crate. The O'Malley in this universe had a perpetually angry, haggard look. "Tilly? What the hell does that miserable bitch want now."

"I don't know, I'm just the errand boy," said Larsson.

"Tch," went O'Malley. "I really hate that girl. She's the worst. Set it down over here."

The workshop was dark save for a single, yellow light in the middle illuminating a blood-stained slab with multiple restraints. A tray of equally bloody tools stood next to it. Larsson followed O'Malley over to the dark shape of a table against the wall. The door slid shut automatically behind him. O'Malley gestured for Larsson to put the crate down on the floor next to the table.

"It had better not be severed heads again. I can't extract information if she _removes the heads from the bodies_ first."

Larsson opened the crate and took a step back. "See for yourself," he said.

The offer was entirely insincere. O'Malley began to lean forward and Larsson slid sideways, wrapping his arm around O'Malley's shoulders and clamping a hand over O'Malley's mouth to prevent him summoning help. The hand was so large it fully eclipsed the lower half of O'Malley's face. Pinning O'Malley's arms to his side, Larsson pulled O'Malley tightly against his chest and whispered in his ear, "Don't struggle. I won't kill you so long as you play nice, all right? You're going to go to sleep, and when you wake up, this will be like a bad dream. But try anything, and you can forget the bad dream. I'll make it a waking nightmare. Got it?"

O'Malley nodded. Lalana hopped out of the crate, phaser curled up in her tail, and O'Malley's eyes went wide with shock at the sight of her inhuman form. He squirmed, but not in a manner indicating he was trying to free himself, simply because he was entirely unnerved and panicking.

The panic did not last. Larsson tightened his arm around O'Malley's neck until O'Malley went limp. Lalana watched with knocking hands. "I am glad you were able to do that. I truly did not wish to have to shoot him. He has the face of a friend."

"Well I have no compunctions about it," commented Larsson. "He's not _my_ friend." Lalana's hands slowed and she clicked a few times, finding some sort of consolation in the cruel amusement.

Larsson administered a sedative they had brought with them for this occasion and picked O'Malley up like a rag doll, strapping him down to his own torture table as an extra precaution in case the sedative wore off too quickly.

"Well, good news is, he sounds just like our colonel. Guess we wasted ourselves a trip."

"Nonsense," said Lalana. "We could not take that chance. What if he had a lisp, or was missing teeth, or slurred his words due to partial facial paralysis, or had grown up on a different region of Earth—"

"All right, I get it!" cried Larsson, throwing up his hands. "Do your magic."

Lalana reached into a pocket on her thermal suit and withdrew a small object the size of a bottlecap—a phonemic modulator. She attached it to her translator and addressed the Charon's computer. The voice from her translator came out sounding like O'Malley. It was a trick she had learned many years ago from the original Lorca and refined during her work for Starfleet Intelligence in the intervening years. Larsson shuddered at the freakishness of it. "Computer, locate Gabriel Lorca."

The voiceprint combined with the pineapple gave them all the access they needed.

* * *

They dragged Lorca to a private torture chamber. It was a dark room lit by strips of blue lighting running up the walls, high ceilings to make the screams echo. "Check his pockets," one of the two agonizer technicians ordered the guards. Sometimes people smuggled weapons into agony booths and made their displeasure against those charged with operating the booths entirely too evident.

They found it, of course. The insignia that had once belonged to this universe's Michael Burnham, to *his* Michael Burnham. The technician turned it over in her fingers and smiled. The emperor would be pleased with this. One of the guards, too, realized its significance. He outranked the technician and ordered the insignia turned over to him so he could deliver it personally and curry some small favor with their tyrannical leader.

They shoved Lorca into the agony booth. Burnham's nerve dampener worked wonders. Lorca stood in the booth, energy crackling across his skin, and screamed almost believably at the sensation.

Almost. Anyone who had heard his screams on the Shenzhou could tell there was a certain degree of desperate urgency lacking in the noises he was currently making. His throat was not being ripped raw and he sounded a little like Burnham had, shouting for shouting's sake. His movements, too, were not the same fervently uncontrollable spasms they had been previously. His arms shook, but with the uneven, occasionally distracted staccato of someone who was playing up the shaking intentionally and losing track of the action every so often.

Turned out that faking agony was harder than actually enduring it. It required an ongoing empty vigilance that bored him. Some part of him was beginning to think he should feign unconsciousness just for a change of pace, but he had to keep the ruse going because he suspected Georgiou was watching, and besides, he had a reputation to maintain.

At least this time he had an awareness of his surroundings. Back on the Shenzhou, pain had consumed everything. Here, he was able to keep track of the pair of techs at the agony booth controls, carefully balancing the power levels against his vitals to ensure their emperor's prized adversary remained as painfully alive as possible. If his stress levels seemed a little low, well, that was only because this was the great Gabriel Lorca. They could hear him screaming well enough. That was proof they were doing their jobs.

He was equally aware of the doors opening and Larsson arriving, but he could not hear the exchange of words that followed.

Larsson's greeting to the two techs was all business. "Interrogator's on his way," he announced, managing to ignore the sight and sound of Lorca's performance almost entirely. "I have his tools. You may want to make yourselves scarce. He's in a terrible mood and might want to use someone as a... demonstration."

The two booth technicians at the console exchanged a look. They seemed less than wholly convinced, but then the comms in the room sounded and O'Malley's voice rang out: "Lieutenant! You had better be there by the time I arrive or—"

The technicians made themselves scarce.

In the booth, Lorca saw the door close behind the technicians. He continued shouting and tried to indicate to Larsson that they were being monitored, but Larsson was not paying attention. He set down the crate he was carrying and up popped Lalana.

Lorca let the exaggerated scream on his lips peter out into sharp grunts of discomfort. He stood in the agony booth, red lightning dancing across his skin, still shuddering and jerking at the painful sensation, but entirely in control. He pounded on the doors. "Monitors!" he shouted at them, angry and disappointed.

Larsson went to the console and turned off the booth. Lalana opened the door with her tail.

"Gabriel," she said in light chastisement, "this is not my first mission." Except the voice was not hers, it belonged to O'Malley. Lorca was aghast. She brushed her tail over her translator, removing the modulator and returning her voice to its usual tone. "Apologies. It was a useful subterfuge. We should be clear for six minutes." The pineapple was still giving her and Larsson significant access to systems in its immediate proximity and she had used this access to construct a video loop.

Lorca let out a sigh of proud relief and smiled broadly at her. "You made it."

"Did you doubt me?"

He had. This universe had been making mincemeat of Burnham and she was human and had a place in it. He was gratified to know Lalana was faring better. "Did you get everything?"

"All relevant files have been downloaded to our pineapple," Lalana reported.

The word threw Lorca. He frowned in disgusted confusion.

"Don't ask," said Larsson.

Lorca shook his head. There was no time to dwell on any of this. "All right. Burnham's gonna be dining with the emperor. We'll want to move then." He knew Georgiou would not move against Burnham during dinner and that no one would dare disturb Georgiou while the meal was in progress. Dinners were oddly sacred to Georgiou. He'd endured enough of them to know. "Let's say... 1945. And be ready for a fight."

"Aye, sir," said Larsson.

"Just keep yourselves safe until then."

"Einar will hide nearby. I will remain here with you," said Lalana.

"Hang on a—"

"This is not a negotiation," said Lalana. "I have not come all this way to lose sight of you now."

There were no hiding places in the room. Lorca pointed this out.

"Hiding is not about finding a place, it is about making yourself one with your surroundings," said Lalana. She turned and went to the darkest corner of the room. Lorca and Larsson watched as she ascended the bend in the walls with the ease of a gecko. She climbed all the way up into the top of the corner, a good five meters from the ground, using the tension of her legs and hands against the walls to hold herself in place. She pressed herself as far back into the corner as she could and shifted colors, becoming a faint ghost of an outline with two giant green eyes staring down at them. The eyes were a dead giveaway, of course, but then something slid over her eyes and they vanished. The broad, flat end of her tail.

He recalled the forest in San Francisco. Back then, she had melded herself into natural patterns and textures. This was something else entirely. Even knowing she was there, she was hard to make out. You had to know exactly where and what to look for. If you did not, all you would see was a faint set of smudges. She even somehow folded the surface of her torso to create a false series of planes that mimicked the appearance of the corner's geometry. (Unbeknownst to him, the filaments on her back were also gripping the surface of the walls and ceiling. She was cemented into this spot as surely as she had been attached to the leskos.)

"Honestly, captain," said Larsson, "did you forget who you were dealing with?"

Lorca had not forgotten. He had never known the full extent of what she could do in the first place. For most of the seven months he had known Lalana—including the month in null time—she had been sitting in a lab doing essentially nothing.

"Don't come down until I tell you!" he called up to her.

"Then I will enjoy the show," she called back, her voice seemingly disembodied. Lorca stepped back into the agony booth and closed the door on himself. He signaled Larsson to turn it back on. He was a little miffed to see Larsson did not hesitate.

As the red crackle reappeared across Lorca's skin, Larsson picked up the crate with the pineapple. "Try not to die, either of you," he bellowed at them as he walked out.

In the hallway, he addressed the door guards. "Hey, those two who were here, get them back here _pronto_. Emperor cancelled the interrogation. If she finds out they left..." He left the suggestion open-ended and strode away, smiling to himself as he heard one of the guards recall the two techs to their post. With any luck, they would be close enough to their positions on the video loop for the seven-second "glitch" Lalana had programmed into the loop's terminus to feel believable.

Larsson made his way back towards O'Malley's dim little workshop. It was a fair distance from the torture chamber, but it was a confirmed safe position. Right now, that was his main priority. Get somewhere quiet and lay low.

Only problem was, a six-foot-four Swede was a lot harder to hide than a lului. As he retraced his steps, Larsson walked past an intersecting hallway and the person down at the other end could scarcely believe her eyes. She immediately touched the nearest wall console and opened a comm line. "Captain Maddox," she said. "You're never going to believe who I just saw."


	82. How Not to Be Afraid When You're a Ghost

A/N: Continues the events of episode 12, "Vaulting Ambition."

I realized I forgot to include one small detail into the previous chapter, Ctrl-F "private" on chapter 81 for the revision. Sorry, I've had, like, twelve hours sleep this past week because I've been up so late writing. But I am operating in accordance with a meticulous plan here, so nothing major is falling through the cracks.

* * *

Stamets awoke from his mycelial coma to the sight of Tilly and with the full breadth of knowledge of everything that had happened to him, even while he was seemingly unresponsive, which was why he knew how much Tilly cared.

He knew something else, too. The mycelial network, the underpinnings of life in this and every other conceivable reality, was under threat.

Stamets had not been alone inside the network. Someone else had been trapped there for far longer: another version of himself. He needed to warn the crew. As he staggered out of the spore reaction chamber, Tilly tried to stop him.

"Do you know how long you've been out?" she exclaimed. "Some things have happened!"

The fog in his mind was clearing rapidly. His movements and voice became calm and steady. "I know about Hugh, but I need you to come with me, right now."

They went into the cultivation bay, but it was too late. The corruption had already destroyed the entire crop. Instead of a beautiful forest of colorful mushroom structures and an atmosphere thick with particles of light, all that remained was a panorama of decay. The particles in the air were like ash. What had once been a miracle of light had turned to darkness, as dark as the universe they now found themselves in.

Saru arrived and was encouraged to find Stamets awake—doubly so since Stamets had been fully cleared of any wrongdoing regarding Culber—but the revelation as to the state of their spore crop was a worrying blow made all the more terrible by the news Stamets brought as to the cause of the calamity.

"He'd been draining the network," Stamets explained.

"The mirror you that you met inside the network," clarified Tilly.

"Why are we calling these versions of ourselves that? Is this Groves again?" Stamets had never really forgiven Groves for "null time."

"Uh, no, I think it was Burnham," managed Tilly.

"If we can please stay focused," said Saru.

Stamets explained how, rather than viewing the mycelial network as a method of travel, in this universe, another version of him had seen it as a source of power. Massive power. Enough to supply a ship the size of a city. The orange sphere that sat at the heart of the Charon was a super-mycelial reactor.

That reactor was draining the network, corrupting it in a way similar to how the spores had been infected with the null time jump, except this corruption was not limited to a single mycelial field, it was the whole of the network at risk.

"And if the network dies, so do we. So does everything. The way the network branches out everywhere, the particles are underpinning everything there is. A threat to the network isn't _just_ a threat to the network, it's a threat to all of reality. Not just this world, not just ours, every possible universe!"

Saru stared at Stamets, his mouth open. Then he drew himself up and said with clear resolve, "Then we must find a way to save it."

* * *

Mirror O'Malley was still strapped unconscious to his torture table and Larsson settled into the chair at O'Malley's desk and put his feet up, prepared to do nothing for the next few hours until called upon.

The door chimed. Larsson ignored it. Let whoever was knocking think O'Malley was out, or busy, or any number of things. The door chimed again. Glancing at O'Malley, Larsson wondered if he should wake O'Malley and try to get him to turn away these visitors, or just see if he could convince them to go away himself. He had been doing a pretty good job of talking people into going places since arriving onboard the Charon. Everyone in this universe was always so scared all the time, all you had to do was prey on their fears and watch them dance.

The doors opened. Guards spilled into the room with weapons drawn. Larsson managed to roll off his chair and behind the slab in the middle of the workshop for cover, drawing his phaser in the process. _Shit_ , he thought to himself as the guards opened fire.

He fired back. The hapless form of O'Malley, strapped to the top of the table, took several blasts from the guards, but under the influence of the sedative, did not wake. Larsson managed to strike one of the guards in the shin, but there were too many. "I give up!" he shouted. "I surrender!" In a situation such as this, when the choice was run into a firestorm and be shot or eventually overwhelmed by sheer numbers, even if you had no expectation of mercy from your opponent, it was the only eventuality in which you had even a sliver of a chance of not getting shot.

Larsson put his phaser on the floor and slid it over to the guards. They stopped firing. He emerged from behind the slab with his hands up and saw the full breadth of the damage done to the mirror O'Malley. Half his body had been eaten away by weapons fire. He was dead without ever having woken up.

Captain Maddox looked at Larsson and smiled.

* * *

Dinner did not go as Burnham expected. They dined in a private dining room, beautiful patterns of light blue and silver-black on the walls, light filtering down from above through a skylight of triangular shapes. The food was delicately-balanced in its flavors and delicious, but when Burnham realized the central ingredient of the dish was Kelpien, it took everything she had to avoid vomiting the whole of it onto the table, especially when Georgiou insisted on personally feeding Burnham the ganglia from her own plate as some sort of enticement. Burnham's eyes were wide with fear as she took the slippery, steamed ganglia from Georgiou's chopsticks into her mouth.

The subject of Harlak came up, of Burnham's refusal to fire on the planet. "You're grown soft," remarked Georgiou.

"And you've grown cruel," said Burnham.

A look flickered across Georgiou's face that Burnham, with her Vulcan upbringing, did not fully appreciate. It was clearly a question. Georgiou wondered why on earth Burnham would say that—as if cruelty, one of the traits the emperor prided herself most on, were some sort of detriment.

"I thought you were dead," spat Georgiou.

In this universe, after her parents had died, Burnham had been adopted by the emperor. Now, the emperor questioned why Burnham had left her side and feigned death for so many months. Burnham spun a tale about Lorca's supporters being everywhere, even on the Charon, and called the deception necessary to bring Lorca to justice.

Georgiou's head shook at this explanation. "Never could tell when you were lying to me," she remarked, rising from her chair and circled around behind Burnham. Another oddity; Burnham did not swivel to keep her eyes on Georgiou. She let Georgiou circle around behind her. "Fortunately, this time, I know."

Georgiou drew the dagger from her hip and pressed it to Burnham's throat from behind. The slender blade pressed against Burnham's jaw.

"You always tried to outsmart me, Michael, even as a child. Why? Was it the loss of your parents? My attention to the Empire? Or were you just built that way? Why were you never satisfied?"

Burnham stared up at Georgiou, trembling slightly. She could not answer any of these questions.

And then, the bombshell. "I knew that you had become Lorca's collaborator and you were conspiring to kill me and take my throne. Why did the two of you come back here?"

Burnham's breath rattled in her throat. She looked down at the blade ever-present against her neck. "Please, Philippa..."

"It's Philippa now? Not so long ago, it was mother!"

Burnham could see the anguished betrayal in Georgiou's eyes but she did not know how to alleviate it. She did not know this Georgiou, but it hurt to see that look of betrayal. It was the same look Burnham had seen on Captain Georgiou when she made the fateful decision to disobey Georgiou's orders so long ago at the Binary Stars.

"Guards!" shouted the emperor. The guards came. "Take her to my throne room. Gather my council. She is to be executed by my own hand for treason."

* * *

The guards brought Larsson to a room that looked to be a hangar, with walkways crisscrossing its three-story height, the massive space lit by eerie blue lights that seemed somehow not to dispel the darkness, but instead of a complement of strike craft, it was full of glowing booths of screaming people. Rows and rows of them. At first this seemed terrible, but then Larsson saw the person in the booth nearest the door and his heart leapt with momentary joy. It was his old friend Matthew Kerrigan. His face lit up at the sight.

This was not an expression Maddox wanted to see. He prodded Larsson with an agonizer rod and was gratified to hear the "gah!" of shocked surprise.

"I'm giving you one chance," Maddox said. "You tell me how you came to be here, or you can join your friends."

There was nothing Larsson wanted more in the world than to join his friends. "So be it," he said jovially.

Maddox adjusted the rod a notch higher and jabbed Larsson again. This time, the response was a strangled yell of pain and Larsson doubled over, steadying himself in the aftermath of it with long, gasping breaths.

"How are you here," demanded Maddox, almost shaking with fury because if Larsson was still alive, it meant there was a chance of something Maddox wanted more than anything. "Where's Ava?"

Larsson blinked and straightened. "I don't know an Ava," he said.

This was not the right answer. Maddox shoved Larsson as hard as he could, but since Larsson was so big, the move only caused him to lean back slightly.

"Don't lie to me!" sneered Maddox. "You served with my sister for _seven years_."

"Oh, that Ava," said Larsson, even though he still had no idea who Maddox was referring to. "Probably wherever you left her."

Maddox purpled with rage. He shouted with force enough that it sprayed spittle even all the way up on Larsson's face. "I left her on the Buran with _you!_ "

The Buran. This universe's Einar Larsson had served on the Buran, but the Larsson formerly of Starfleet had not. "Ava" must have been one of the many new crewmen, ensigns, and cadets that joined the Buran at its launch. Larsson knew none of those people. He only knew the crew who had previously served with him on the Triton.

Larsson swallowed. "I don't know what to tell you."

"Tell me how you and Lorca survived the Buran," sneered Maddox.

"I didn't," said Larsson, still sounding like he was taking the piss out of Maddox, even if the reality was he was telling Maddox the truth. "Everyone on the Buran died, so you'll have to ask the person who fired that shot, and as for the captain, go ask him yourself. I don't answer for him."

The gall of Larsson's words was too much. It felt like a punch in the gut. Maddox turned the agonizer rod up to its maximum setting and prodded Larsson again. Larsson seized up, soundlessly stiffening as his body convulsed in pain. Then, like a tall and mighty tree almost as impressive in size as the ones on Luluan, he tilted to the side and fell over, unconscious.

Maddox ordered Larsson tossed into the nearest holding pen and looked across the sea of agonizer booths. He pointed at the booth nearest the door. "This one comes with me," he announced, then jerked his thumb at the pen containing Larsson. "Put that one in there when he wakes up."

Lorca's followers were always so loyal to him. They loved him, each and every one of them, to a fault. When questioned on this point, they always responded with the most ridiculous of reasons for it: they claimed Lorca loved them back.

Let Lorca lose someone he loved, the way Maddox had. Hell, let him lose all of them, one by one, and Maddox would watch until he felt Lorca's suffering equaled his own.

* * *

The throne room was as dark and dim as every other room in this universe, but it was also resplendent with shimmers of gold piping up and down its walls. The throne itself was a dais surrounded by an arc of silver-gold tubes, each tipped with light. Georgiou stood upon this dais and held aloft a sword as shiny a silver-gold as everything else. Her council stood arrayed around her, their black uniforms a backdrop to the golden breastplates they wore etched with intricate details of lines and angles.

"Captain Michael Burnham. We have sentenced you to death for crimes committed against the Terran throne. Do you have any last words before we collect our retribution?"

Burnham stared at Georgiou, resolute.

"At least you are showing some steel," remarked Georgiou, gratified to finally see some semblance of the Burnham she remembered rather than the cowering, uncomfortable person she had witnessed at dinner. "I do love you, Michael. I would never grant anyone else in the empire the mercy of a quick death."

"You don't love me," said Burnham. "You don't love me because you don't know me. Before today, you and I have never met. I am Michael Burnham, but I am not _your_ Michael Burnham. I'm from another universe. I have proof. It's in my pocket."

It was the rank insignia belonging to Captain Philippa Georgiou. At Burnham's instruction, the emperor checked the quantum variance of the metal. It proved beyond all doubt that Burnham spoke the truth.

"What a quaint concept," said Georgiou coldly. "Parallel universes." She took something from the arm of her throne. It looked like a gear edged in spikes.

Georgiou threw it with a sudden jerk of her arm. The spiked gear spun through the air in a circle, shooting through the skulls of the assembled council members and guards with a horrible _shhhk_. One by one they fell to the ground, dead. The spiked gear came to rest again in the palm of Georgiou's hand and she returned it to its cradle.

Georgiou approached Burnham, the Starfleet insignia in hand. "This is from the United Federation of Planets. And apparently, so are you."

Of course Georgiou knew of the existence of the Federation; she was familiar with the full, unredacted contents of the files belonging to the USS Defiant. She finally understood why everything about this Burnham turned her stomach, but now that the room was cleared of any curious ears, she was willing to hear this Burnham out.

Burnham pled for Georgiou's assistance for herself and her compatriots. It was amusing, if nothing else. She pled, too, for her captain.

"You have no reason to hold my captain any longer," said Burnham, because so far as she knew, he was equally as innocent as she was in all of this. "He shouldn't have to suffer for your Lorca's crimes."

Georgiou refused. As far as she was concerned, Lorca could rot. Any Lorca—every Lorca. She was entirely that petty and cruel. She prided herself on it, in fact.

"Emperor, my ship and crew are here by accident. All we want is to return to our universe, but we need your help to do that."

"What reason from any universe would I have to help you?"

"Because you care for Burnham. Despite her betrayal, you said you loved her."

Georgiou had said that, in the moment before she was preparing to strike Burnham down, because she wanted Burnham to die with the knowledge that everything she'd had with Lorca, she could have had with Georgiou instead. She wanted Burnham to beg and plead and think that she could appeal to this "love" before killing her. Amusingly, this Burnham had both turned the script upside-down and taken Georgiou at face value.

To Burnham, of course, it was impossible to conceive of a universe in which Georgiou did not love her, because her captain had loved and admired her almost from the first moment they met. It seemed right, too, that the Burnham in this universe must have loved Georgiou even if she betrayed her, because Burnham had loved and betrayed her captain. To her, the events were completely analogous.

Yet still Georgiou denied Burnham. "Your people are dangerous. 'The Federation.' I know it well from the Defiant's files. There is a reason why they're classified. Equality, freedom, cooperation." She rattled off the core tenets of the Federation like insults.

"Cornerstones of successful cultures," countered Burnham.

"Delusions that Terrans shed millennia ago, destructive ideals that fuel rebellions, and I will not let you infect us again!"

"We just need access to the redacted information about the Defiant. We believe that it'll help us get back. Share it, and you have my word you'll never hear from us again."

Then the emperor told her the full details of the Defiant's fate.

The Defiant had not crossed peacefully into this universe. It had journeyed through interphasic space and its journey had horribly warped the minds of its crew, driving them insane. The crew had torn one another apart. "I am surprised the same thing didn't happen to your crew."

Burnham explained the Discovery had come a different route, by spore displacement drive. Georgiou listened to the details of this technology, eyes glimmering at the possibilities it presented, and offered an exchange: the details of this technology in exchange for Discovery's freedom. "If I agree, how do I know you'll let us go?"

"Was your Georgiou a woman of honor?" guessed the emperor.

"Entirely," said Burnham.

"Then you have no reason to believe I am not as well," said Georgiou.

Georgiou had just killed her entire council for the crime of being in the room and hearing something they should not have, but Burnham looked at Georgiou and believed this overture of honor because when she looked at the emperor's face, she discovered a truth that had been known to Lalana and Lorca for months now: looking into the face of someone you loved and had lost was worth everything in the universe.

Ghosts were not something that haunted you. They were something you lived for.

* * *

As much as Lorca was aware of his surroundings, he did not have any real sense of time inside the booth, so he failed to notice when 1945 came and went with no sign of Larsson.

He did, however, notice the arrival of Captain Maddox. The pair of agony techs exited once again and Maddox strode into the middle of the room and addressed Lorca with confidence and even delight. The time had come for Maddox to receive something he had been longing and aching for ever since his sister's death and he was looking forward to finally having the upper hand against Lorca. "Tell me, Gabriel. Where have you been hiding since the Buran was blown to bits?"

"With friends," said Lorca simply.

"What friends do you have left? The emperor rounded up all your loyalists from every corner of the Empire. We had to fill the aft hangar bay with agonizer booths just to accommodate them all."

Lorca could scarcely believe his luck. True to form, Georgiou's lack of tactical prowess was astounding, not to mention entirely predictable. Rather than kill the people who wanted her gone, she had collected them in one place. No wonder the empire was crumbling under her leadership. He honestly wasn't sure who was the worse tactician: the emperor or the Starfleet captain who shared her face in the other universe. Now all Lorca had to do was get to the aft hangar bay. This attempt at revenge had just turned into something much, much bigger.

Right now, though, Maddox was not here for the emperor, he was here for himself. He needed to know, needed to hear it from Lorca's own lips.

"She was my sister. Admit what you did."

"Or what?" Lorca retorted, unphased by Maddox's unvoiced threat. He marveled at the fact Maddox had come to harass him for an admission of guilt in the matter of Ava's death because, according to the files they had obtained from the Klingon data core in the debris field, the Charon had been the ship responsible for the Buran's destruction. That meant Maddox had ordered the weapons volley that killed his sister and the rest of the Buran's crew. A fact Maddox seemed entirely unwilling to admit to himself.

The doors opened. In came one of those aforementioned loyalists from the bay of booths, escorted by a pair of guards: Kerrigan.

In every universe, Kerrigan was a bit of a bumbler. Loyal, but largely ineffective. That was why, when Jackson Benford had left the ISS Buran for a command of his own six years back, Lorca had sent the bumbling Kerrigan along with Benford and kept the cooler-headed, more competent Eraldo Russo for himself. Now Russo was dead and Kerrigan was staring up at Lorca with big brown eyes like he was witnessing the second coming, because from his perspective, he was.

Kerrigan whimpered and stammered. "Gabriel! You're alive? I, I-I thought they were lying—"

Maybe Kerrigan was a fool, but Lorca felt a pang of distress seeing the younger man kneeling on the floor before him. "Chin up, soldier," said Lorca, an encouragement and order, but Kerrigan kept blubbering about how he had never lost faith in the idea Lorca was still alive.

Maddox slammed Kerrigan's face into the floor and asked, "What do you have to say?"

And Lorca, because he could not resist, because he could never resist in these sorts of moments, went, "About what?" with a shrug.

Maddox growled. "My sister!"

Lorca's face lit up with amusement. "Ah, there are so many women! What can I say? It's good to be the captain!"

"Say her name," said Maddox. "Say her name so I can spare your friend."

"Just say it," went Kerrigan, starting to cry. "Please?"

The levity dropped away. "Leave him out of this," said Lorca darkly. "This is between you and me." He was hoping it might encourage Maddox to come at him directly.

It did not.

Maddox had a syringe containing the DNA of a deadly parasite from Tonnata VII which was entirely incompatible with human DNA. He injected it into Kerrigan's neck. The results were immediate. Lorca had to look away and close his eyes. As Kerrigan's mouth opened in an anguished cry of pain, his skin lit up red and seemed to burn with energy as the DNA ate away at him from the inside. He popped like a balloon, an explosion of blood and ichor. His blood splattered across the door of the booth.

Maybe saying the name Maddox sought would have saved Kerrigan, but more likely not. Kerrigan had been dead the moment he walked through that door. Lorca remembered calling the parents of the other Matthew Kerrigan, who had died aboard the Buran. Parents so loving they had tried to comfort the man responsible for their son's death. He wondered for a moment what Kerrigan's parents would make of him in this universe. Would they, too, share the love and admiration their son had for Lorca? Or would they just blame him the way so many others had? The way Maddox clearly did.

Maddox turned his attention to the booth controls. Lorca found himself resuming his pantomime. He let out a half-strangled whine.

"My sister loved you!" Maddox yelled. "Say her name and beg for forgiveness!"

Lorca went entirely silent at that. Maddox angrily turned the booth settings to full power.

 _That_ Lorca felt. He yelled with momentary surprise, struggling to overcome the sensation of pain as it returned for real. The booth was on full. Perfect. He clutched his hands against his chest as he sank to the floor, gasping as if his heart was about to burst.

Maddox came rushing over without double-checking the monitors. "Don't die on me, you depraved bastard!" The one thing Georgiou never tolerated was others stealing kills she considered rightfully her own. Lorca was at the top of that list. Maddox opened the door and Lorca fell to the ground, unresponsive.

Lorca let Maddox panic, grab the defibrillator, kneel down beside him. "I need you to live or I'm as good as dead," gasped Maddox, charging the paddles.

Lorca's eyes snapped open and he grabbed Maddox. "You're right," said Lorca, using Maddox's surprise to shove him away. Lorca grabbed the defibrillator, wrapped the cord around Maddox's neck, and pressed the charged paddles against the side of Maddox's head. Maddox fell to the ground. He was not fully dead, but he was good as. His body twitched and convulsed. His brain was fried.

Lorca stood over Maddox, sneering down at him. "Ava," said Lorca. "Her name was Ava. And I liked her. But you know how it is. Somebody better came along." He brought his boot down on Maddox's head. Unlike Georgiou, he did not leave people alive who might come back to haunt him.

Satisfied, Lorca looked up towards the dark corner and opened his mouth.

"I suppose this is as good a time as any," said a voice.

Lorca froze, eyes widening. He spun around and saw the last person he expected.

It was John Allan.


	83. In Due Time

A/N: Takes place between episode 12, "Vaulting Ambition," and episode 13, "What's Past is Prologue."

Remember when I said all would be revealed "in due time" back in chapter 63? Yep, that's right, this chapter was already written and that was a SHAMELESS PUN. Enjoy your latest secret reveal, folks. That said, this fanfic STILL probably isn't doing what you might think. Remember, no character is omniscient, not even the one who's a time traveler. Well, definitely not him, as you'll see...

Small note: I made a tweak to the timeline of the Triton back in chapter one, switched seven months to three, so that's why the number mentioned here might not be as you remember. It's not actually an important story detail, but because I no longer have access to that document in the story manager, the copy of the story here still says seven months. Sorry for any confusion.

* * *

It was John Allan, but not as Lorca remembered him. He looked gaunt and a little crazy, as you might expect from someone who had vanished from the known universe and been hiding out in some dark corner, except that had been all of three days ago and Allan was also sporting what looked to be a week's worth of beard growth.

"Well if it isn't Schrodinger's son of a bitch," said Lorca, one of those rare allowances he was willing to give to Groves for having coined so apt a phrase.

"Come up with that one yourself?" said Allan, smirking, because he could hear the other John in it.

Lorca frowned at Allan. His tone was entirely facetious as he said, "You mind? I don't have time for jokes. I've got somewhere to be." His own jokes, yes. Not someone else's.

"Actually, _Gabe_ , we've got all the time in the world." Allan held up a device, a small black object with a blue display showing some sort of oscillating rhythm. "It's called a temporal stasis field, but you might know it better as—"

"Null time," said Lorca. It confirmed what he already knew. Allan had caused the accident on Discovery all those months ago.

Allan hummed faintly in some sort of amusement or appreciation. It was hard to know which; Lorca did not know Allan well if at all.

"To what do I owe the pleasure?" asked Lorca, crossing his arms. "Come to warn me about the future?"

"Far from it," said Allan. "I just wanted to see the look on your face when I told you the truth and deliver a message. Message as follows: I'll never forgive you for what you did to Melly."

Lorca raised an eyebrow. Allan looked somber and grave, but Lorca saw an opportunity for some fun. "Which time? There were several. Mind you, first time, she didn't know which way was up, but I sure showed her."

Allan fell silent, staring at Lorca with silent fury. Lorca was delighted, smirking at Allan with smug self-satisfaction.

"So now, what's this truth you've brought me?"

He half expected some grand reveal about time travel he already knew or to learn that John Allan was secretly his and Mischkelovitz's son or something else equally nonsensical. Of course Allan wasn't his son, that was a practical impossibility. Even if Lorca changed his mind on the subject in the near future, Allan had brown eyes, so while he was certainly someone's son, it was unlikely to be the result of blue-eyed Lorca and Mischkelovitz. Maybe Groves or that four-fingered half-sister of his, Danica Stewart, but Allan seemed a little too short and too pale to be either of theirs. Unless Groves had made good on his jibe about being involved with Mischkelovitz, which was about as gross a proposition as could be imagined. Lorca almost laughed out loud at the thought.

Allan's truth was something else entirely. "You were given a gift you don't deserve."

"What 'gift' would that be?" he drawled, lip curling into a sneer. As far as he was concerned, he had never been given anything. Everything he had he had taken for himself, because that was who he was. Someone whose force of will was so strong the very universe bent to accommodate it. As it was bending now.

"Lalana."

Lorca snorted and started to chuckle. That was preposterous. "Nobody _gave_ me Lalana!"

Allan was not laughing. He tilted his head and smiled knowingly. "That's the thing, Gabe. For reasons I'll never understand, someone did."

With his free hand, Allan reached into his pocket and pulled out another device: a tiny silver disc the size of a coin. He flipped it into the air with his thumb and it froze in midair, floating and spinning. For a moment, Lorca thought it was a weapon (Georgiou had a weapon like that) but instead of shooting through the air and killing him, something else happened.

Emellia Mischkelovitz appeared in a holographic projection so perfect it felt like she was in the room. She was older, lines in her face and waves of soft grey hair falling across her shoulders, but it was definitely her.

There was no flickering, no vague sense of emptiness like with current holotechnology. Lorca felt like he could have reached out and touched her. He realized why: the lighting. He could see the lights of the room glinting off her mismatched eyes. She cast a shadow. For a moment, he doubted it was a hologram at all.

All doubts were erased as she began to speak.

"Hello, Lan. It's me, Melly." It was a recording. When she spoke, she was calm and confident, nothing like the current Mischkelovitz. There was a sense of serenity to her. "I know you probably thought you'd never see me again, but I asked a friend to deliver you this message in the hopes that you'd do me one last favor.

"I know you'll wonder why I'm asking this favor of you, out of all the things I could have possibly asked. Time travel is such a potent thing, and most people, if they could do or change anything, would change something more important. Personally important, like the death of a family member. I've certainly lost enough of those.

"But it's because time travel is so important that I'm asking you to do this instead. History must _be_. In order for you to come here and meet me, history must be as it is, as it was, as it will be. So I cannot change history. But I've gone through all the historical records, and I believe it is possible to make two small tweaks without compromising the integrity of the timeline. And to answer your question as to why, I can only say this: history does not look kindly on monsters. That's why we have to stick together.

"Now, this plan isn't without its flaws. I know that doing this will destroy the person that I am right now, that I'll cease to exist as I am, but this isn't about me. And if my sacrifice can right this wrong, then everything I've lived through will have been worth it. It will also take something from a friend of mine, but... Well, he won't know what he never had, will he? And in some ways that's better.

"Anyway, I'm counting on you, Lan, because I can't save the person I want to save. Mischka died, and I've accepted that. I can't save anyone. But I can make sure that no one is alone. I can do that, if you'll help me. And I promise you won't regret it if you do. You didn't the first time, when you helped me figure out how to do this. And since you're receiving this message from yourself, then the fact is you already went back and did these things. It's just time for you go do them now.

"Your first destination is 2247. You need to find Captain Chaudhuri of the Triton and..."

Allan terminated the image with a wave of his hand and plucked the little projector from the air. "Do you have any idea what this is?"

Lorca stared at Allan and realized the question was not rhetorical. His voice was an amazed whisper. "A message from the future."

Allan had expected that answer. "No, it is not. This version of Melly never existed. This isn't a message from the future, it's a fragment from another timeline, another universe. It shouldn't be, it's impossible. But it is. That's what she did. She found a way to preserve a remnant of what I can only assume is the original timeline so that it would survive when the timeline changed and prevent the creation of a temporal loop or paradox.

"I was sent back to this time, to this place, because it was what has always happened. My being here was ordained centuries before my birth. But this?" Allan held up the holorecording. "This is a miracle. Her miracle. And she wasted it on you. Because this is not the original timeline. The moment she sent this, that ceased. This is what we've been left with. And I don't know what to make of that. I only know that she gave you something you don't deserve. The thing she took from her friend was Lalana. She gave you Lalana."

"How," demanded Lorca. His eyes were locked on Allan with a fierce intensity.

Allan considered the question. He knew what was going to happen, so would it really matter any if he explained?

"In the original timeline, Lalana wasn't rescued by the Triton, she was rescued by the Shenzhou..."

Allan outlined all of it. The events of the original timeline, the three changes he had been instructed to make. First, making the original captain of the Triton sick less than a year from his retirement so the man waiting in the wings for promotion was handed command of his vessel for seven months ahead of its crew's reassignment to the Buran. Second, the preset coordinates of a shuttlecraft on a Tederek moon adjusted a couple of degrees so that when it went hurtling off into space, it intersected within transmission range of the flight path of the Triton. Third, a null time bubble initiated by seeding a single canister of spores with chronitons so their function in the drive was inert and their temporal stasis spread like an infection to the live spores of the second canister while the jump was underway.

As Allan revealed this, it became clear why. There was amazement in his eyes, fervent adoration for the architect of it all, and some sort of relieved honor at having been part of it. That he was the instrument she had chosen gave him a sense of elation. He was _proud_ and wanted someone to know what he had done, what they had done together.

The net result of it all was that Lalana ended up cemented to Lorca's side, rather than with a deep and enduring friendship with Saru. That part shocked Lorca the most. Saru? He stood there, face colored with confusion, and Allan was glad to see it because anything that made Lorca look less than smugly confident was a win in his book.

"I really thought I'd destroyed the timeline," Allan concluded. "But it seems everything's turning out just fine, because you're still exactly where you're supposed to be. I suppose time is self-correcting itself. It makes me wonder, though. If Lalana could choose, who would she have chosen? Saru or you?"

"I would have chosen the captain, and I choose him still," came the answer.

Allan staggered backwards, shocked to see Lalana appear high up in the corner of the room. She dropped down to the floor and landed with graceful ease. "H-How—"

He had been monitoring the security feeds on the Charon, waiting for the opportunity to speak to Lorca alone. The feeds Lalana had looped to disguise her arrival.

"You have not seen things as clearly as you thought," said Lalana. She looked to Lorca. "I am sorry, I know you told me to wait until you called, but I believe that was an appropriate opportunity for a 'dramatic entrance?'"

Lorca chuckled. "That it was."

Allan's head shook. How could Lalana be here? He had been so careful to avoid making any further changes since the jump here. Was the timeline still in flux?

"To answer your question, while Saru is a lovely person and I am sure we could have made excellent friends above and beyond the acquaintance we currently share, the fact is that the Saru who was before the Battle of the Binary Stars and the Saru who is now are not so different. Even if I did love Saru and not the captain, or loved them both, or loved them neither, I would choose the captain because he is a different person and he has need of me, and I choose him still."

Allan stared at Lalana as she spoke, realization dawning. He had been lied to. The person who had lied to him might have called it a repurposed truth, but to Allan, there was no mistaking the act. It was lying no matter what you called it.

It was the last realization he ever had. Taking advantage of Allan's distraction, Lorca picked up the phaser from Maddox's holster, set it to its highest level, and fired. The phaser struck Allan from behind and blasted a hole in his backside that burned partly through to his organs. He fell to the ground.

Lorca wasted no time. He dashed forward, jammed the butt of the phaser in Allan's mouth, and watched as Allan struggled to close his jaw. Lalana joined him.

"I wish to thank you, Mr. Allan," she said. "You have actually given Gabriel and I two incredible gifts. First, you have given us time, which is the most valuable gift there is, and second, you have given us your story, and stories are the best gift."

The light faded from Allan's eyes.

"I do wonder if that was necessary," said Lalana, knocking her hands faintly. "It seems to me John Allan's intention was never to hurt us."

"You heard what Groves said," said Lorca, taking the holographic disc and the black handheld device from Allan's corpse. "We couldn't let him live." He checked Allan for any other devices but found none. Then he took the phaser from Allan's mouth and felt around his teeth. They seemed normal enough. He pried Allan's jaw open. "Can you check his teeth?"

Using her tail, Lalana easily detected the one tooth that was not like the others. She delicately pried it out.

There was a beeping. The screen on the handheld device was flashing red with an exclamation point. Lorca looked at it, watched the exclamation point turn into a countdown, and threw it across the room. He grabbed Lalana and dashed over behind the agonizer control console, huddling with her behind it.

There was a long, sustained beep. Then a little pop and fizzle. Lorca peered out from behind the console. The device had melted into a puddle of components that were dissolving into the air. A moment later, Allan's body began to do the same, until all that was left of him was an empty Terran uniform lying on the ground.

"The null time field is disappearing," reported Lalana. They still had the holorecording and Allan's tooth. Apparently being removed from his body saved it from whatever grisly fate the rest of him had enjoyed.

"Do you realize what that was?" said Lorca. Lalana craned her head at him. "Destiny. Destiny brought the two of us together and destiny put us here for a reason." He took the tooth from Lalana and turned it in his fingers, studying it carefully.

"I am not so certain. I think Allan being here may have been an accident."

Lorca closed his hand around the tooth. "None of that was an accident." There was something sweeping and grandiose in his tone, and also something very familiar. A sort of dark obsessiveness, like he had taken hold of something in his mind as surely as he had taken hold of Allan's tooth.

"Gabriel, when was the last time you slept?"

Lorca ignored the question and checked the time. It was well after 1945. "I think we lost Larsson."

Lalana knocked her hands together. "We must find him."

"We will," said Lorca, not believing it for a second, "but we gotta get outta here first. You ready?"

"Yes."

As they burst from the room and surprised the guards and agonizer techs waiting outside, Lorca felt a surge of adrenaline and confidence. He was more certain of it than ever. Destiny was leading him right where he wanted to be. Everything was falling right into place.

Beside him, her colors shifting seamlessly to match the corridors and panels around them as they moved, Lalana began to worry. He was running. He had started running and he could not stop. All she could do now was try to keep up with him and maintain the promise she had given to the other Lorca. It did not matter that he was running so long as she was running with him.

But for the first time, she began to question if she could keep up. Whatever Lorca thought the conversation with Allan meant, Lalana was certain the truth was something different. She just didn't know what.


	84. Blue Moon

A/N: Completes the events of episode 12, "Vaulting Ambition," and begins episode 13, "What's Past Is Prologue."

Also, slightly worried I might have lost everyone on the last chapter. I sincerely hope that's not the case! Gah, I knew Allan was a risk, but it had been so long planned (I mean, he essentially told you who he was in chapter 62) and everything's held together in such delicate balance, I don't dare deviate now. Not when we're in the home stretch!

* * *

They slipped past and around security measures, deftly sidestepping guards and slipping into maintenance shafts to avoid being tracked. "It is amazing that there is no alarm yet," remarked Lalana as they narrowly avoided a pair of guards on patrol.

"We didn't leave much evidence." The door guards and agonizer techs were currently piled on top of Maddox in the back of the torture chamber. Eventually someone would notice when it came time for a shift change or when Georgiou tuned back in to what Lorca was sure was her new favorite show only to discover the star had left, but for the time being, it seemed the miraculous return of Michael Burnham was keeping Georgiou sufficiently distracted and the lack of guards on the door was an easy thing to overlook.

There was another point to consider, too. "Not to mention," added Lorca after a moment, "the thing about ruling through fear is everyone's too scared to tell you when they fuck up." He knew a little of that firsthand, but not to the extent Georgiou did.

The implication of this was easy enough to work out. "Meaning someone may know but has not reported it."

"Maybe," said Lorca, not certain of his own logic for a moment. Also possibly someone would rush to report the incident because it reflected poorly on others and offered a chance to curry favor with Georgiou. Dealing with the emperor was like flipping a coin. One side of the coin, the emperor rewarded you for your attentive service. The other side, she killed you for bringing her bad news. If you were really lucky, the coin landed on its side and you never had to find out which, because both options entailed deadly risk.

"This would be much easier with the pineapple," noted Lalana.

Lorca winced. This was the second time Lalana had mentioned it. "What pineapple?" he repeated incredulously. When she explained it was a system-hacking device designed by Groves, Lorca groaned. Of course that godawful moniker came from Groves. Even far removed from Discovery, the universe's most annoying non-crewmember was still finding ways to taunt him.

They were almost at the aft hangar now. Lorca paused around the corner. He could just about picture the hangar doors and guess at the placement of the guards because Imperial guard placements were frequently predictable. "Two guards. Two shots." For a moment he wished he had Tyler with him. Then he remembered there was no Tyler, that had been Voq, and it colored his face with revulsion.

He spun around the corner. First shot a hit, second a miss, but a third in quick succession had the right adjustment to find its mark. This was essentially the far reaches of the ship, not strategically important, and it seemed unnecessary to post too many guards on what amounted to long-term storage facilities. A fine folly on the part of all responsible parties.

They started down the hall to the hangar doors.

"Now we can save your people," said Lalana.

Lorca stopped. His people were not going to understand Lalana at all. He barely understood her, and he knew her and the lengths she would go to protect him.

"You need to hide," he said. "And this time, no coming out unless I tell you, even if someone walks out and calls your name, got it?" He looked around. The hallway ceilings were much too low and too bright. He spotted a vent. "In there."

Another shot blasted the vent open. It was dark within. Lalana disappeared inside. How deep she went, Lorca could not tell. She might have gone in some distance or been hunched right by the entrance. She was functionally invisible either way. He hoped she was far enough in to not get caught in a firefight in the event one erupted.

The sight of the rows of agony booths dozens deep in the hangar bay filled him with encouragement. The two techs on duty were in the middle of escorting someone into the booth nearest the door and Lorca took them by surprise, but the surprise was equally his to discover himself staring once again at Einar Larsson.

"Captain," said Larsson.

"You have the devil's own luck," grinned Lorca, though Larsson's presence was simultaneously a benefit and a problem. Lorca was not entirely sure how he was going to explain himself to Larsson, who still thought Lorca was the rightful captain of Discovery from the other universe. Lorca offered Larsson the rifle he was holding. "Guard the hallway."

"Aye sir," said Larsson, taking the weapon and the position ordered. "You know, I saw Matty Kerrigan. They took him away, but he was in here."

"Did you now," said Lorca. "Well, maybe you'll see him again."

* * *

Georgiou allowed Burnham to contact Discovery, make the offer to trade the engine technology. Saru agreed to it, just as Burnham assured Georgiou he would, and Burnham sent them the coordinates of the Charon to rendezvous.

Georgiou sneered as the transmission ended. "The Federation, through and through. They would never abandon you and your captain. Rules to live by. Rules to die by."

Which reminded Burnham that, just like on the Shenzhou, she was standing here relatively safe and comfortable while Lorca was locked up below being tortured. "I need to see my captain. He won't survive your agonizers much longer, he's suffering!"

"Let him," said Georgiou. "If your bond to me crosses universes, then so does his treachery. The Lorca I knew was my right hand. I trusted him with the empire's most sensitive missions. I... trusted him with you."

"I don't understand."

Georgiou told Burnham of her mirror self. "When I adopted you, you gained a mother. But despite my constant guidance and affection, something was still missing. In Lorca, you saw a father. Until you grew up and it became more."

At first, Burnham thought she was hearing wrong, or that this was some sort of joke. "You're saying Lorca and I..."

"He groomed you," said Georgiou. "He chose you. He told you that destiny brought you together. He said he'd cross time and space itself to take what was rightfully his."

As the light of the mycelial reactor that powered the Charon surged, Emperor Georgiou winced and turned away from the window.

"You're sensitive to light," realized Burnham.

"Only compared to a human from your universe," Georgiou told her. "It's the singular biological difference between our two races."

Her Lorca was sensitive to light, too. An idiosyncrasy he claimed was a result of the Buran yet refused to fix. He had not brought his ocular spray with him on this mission. He had not used it once since their arrival here.

Moments flashed through Burnham's mind, memories of her time spent with the Lorca she knew. How he said he had chosen her, how he kept insisting there was some destiny to their meeting, the filled-in map of the mycelial network proving the existence of parallel worlds—a map Lorca could not have made himself, could not have even dreamed up unless he had somehow known about it in advance.

"He needed me," she realized, "to get onto this ship. You wouldn't have let him on otherwise. He needed me to get to you. None of this was an accident. My so-called captain's not from my universe. He's from yours."

But of course, Georgiou had already known that, because in his pocket they had found the insignia of her Michael Burnham. It was satisfying, watching Burnham's sense of betrayal unfold upon her face. Georgiou would never get to witness this on her own Burnham, but she now knew a truth of her own.

When the person you wanted to see suffer was dead, it meant everything to be able to see that suffering on their face, even if it belonged to another person.

There was an alert. "Emperor," reported a voice, "the traitor Lorca has escaped. Captain Maddox is dead."

"Assemble my battalion captains," ordered Georgiou. She turned to Burnham with a terrible look of disappointment and accusation once more. "You knew."

Burnham's head shook. "I swear to you, until a moment ago, I had no idea the true nature of my captain."

"Hm," went Georgiou. "You wanted me to let him go. You love your captain so much, you can watch us hunt him down like the rat he is."

"I don't love him," insisted Burnham, eyes wide with disbelief. "I don't even know him."

* * *

One by one, the booths opened. As Lorca released people whose faces had been haunting him ever since his arrival in the other universe, he saw the looks of relief and elation and heard their voices tremble with awe and excitement. As glad as they were to see him, he was equally glad to have come back and found them waiting.

There were so many more faces missing, though. Maddox's claim that Georgiou had rounded up all his followers was either a gross exaggeration or indicated many of them had not survived to make it to the booths. That was worrisome, but he was already preparing to counter it. The better part of tactics was being prepared for every eventuality, and he was wholly prepared.

People began to cluster around him as they emerged, eager for reassurance. He was more than happy to provide it. "One year, 212 days of torture, of agony, my friends, my followers," he said, his tone and rhetoric a mixture of comfort and sweeping inspiration, "but I have returned to give meaning to your suffering. Today is the day we reclaim our empire."

They responded to him with adoration. Choruses of "Captain!" and "Long live the Empire!" in response.

In one of the central booths he found someone who was a friend in both universes. She was sitting on the floor of the booth, rubbing at the soreness in her legs, but she moved to stand as he neared and she was halfway up when the booth door opened and she looked up at him with tired, dark eyes.

"Captain?" she asked, voice rising with hope and disbelief.

He smiled. "Welcome back, Commander Landry."

She looked thinner, gaunt, and he offered her his hand to help her to her feet. He was relieved to find, despite the loss of muscle mass, Landry was entirely capable of standing and gave a small nod to indicate the majority of her current dazed state was mental, not physical in origin. Shock at his arrival. "They told us you were dead."

"And you believed them?" he replied, face lifting in mild question.

"Not for a second, sir."

A bald officer Lorca recognized as being a munitions expert was already disseminating available weapons to people. Lorca took a rifle from him and gave it to Landry. "Let's get you geared up."

"Sir," said Landry. "Charon has ten battalions of Imperial guards on station." While Landry in the other universe had essentially been an overzealous warden, this Landry was entirely the tactical officer Lorca remembered her to be and her first concern was updating him as to her knowledge of the tactical situation. "I don't know how you got here, or how you got us all out alive, but we should withdraw, regroup. We still have supporters on several worlds."

"The emperor's ship is exactly where we need to be," Lorca assured her. "I have been to another universe and back. You think I'd come all this way without a plan?"

His smile was entirely confident. As Landry gazed up at him, he could see her strength returning to her in mind and spirit.

"Now take all available guns and secure that hallway."

"Yes, sir."

Landry hastened to execute Lorca's command. The doors opened and Larsson was startled to see her. "Commander," he greeted, like he was seeing a ghost.

She was equally surprised, having thought him dead on the Buran. "Lieutenant Larsson. Look alive." As she moved out with several others to secure the far end of the hall, Larsson marveled at the ingenuity of it. Freeing the people in the agony booths as backup. Then he began to wonder two things. What precisely were they doing, and where was Lalana?

* * *

Lorca made his way through the hangar, trying not to get too distracted by the throng of desperately hopeful people who were clamoring for even the smallest word of encouragement.

There was someone else he still had to find.

She was all the way in the back, scratching idly at welts on her arms. Her hair was longer and there were scars across her cheeks and neck and everywhere else, but there was no mistaking those all-too-familiar and entirely unsettling mismatched pupils, even if they were missing the light that someone had once described as the enduring feature of those eyes. Lorca looked at her coldly. "Hello, Petra."

"Captain," said Emellia Petrellovitz. For all that she looked wretched, her voice was as coldly demanding as ever. She was not shocked to see him, nor was she elated in any sense of the word. She could care less about him. There was only one thing she did care about where Lorca was concerned. "Did you find Michael?"

That question was going to take some answering.


	85. I Could Never Be Your Woman

A/N: Takes place during episode 13, "What's Past Is Prologue."

* * *

Standing in the back of the hangar, the blueish lights casting them both in an icy pall, Lorca stared at Petrellovitz with an expression that was part grimace, part regret. Too long had he imagined this moment and in none of his imaginings had it looked like this. Now that he was standing in the moment, he wondered why he had bothered to imagine it at all.

The way Petrellovitz stared back at him felt like death. Dead eyes, dead expression, dead skin, and the death in her went far deeper than that. There was a feeling of festering rot that seemed to emanate from some pit where her heart should have been. She was not as dead as their Michael Burnham, but her trademark unearthliness came close.

"I found Michael," said Lorca, his head nodding slightly and mostly automatically. He took a small breath. "She's dead." It was barely more than a whisper. For a moment, his face registered grief and he was relieved they were in the far back of the hangar and he was standing with his back to the rest of the world.

"Ah," said Petrellovitz. She ceased scratching at her arm and pulled the sleeve of her jumpsuit down to cover the bloodied mess of wounds there, then began digging at the blood under her fingernails with her teeth.

Lorca searched her for some indication she had registered this information in any meaningful sense and found none. The lack of response left him feeling momentarily at a loss.

Seeing his vague confusion, Petrellovitz shrugged faintly. "Did you want me to cry?"

Lorca had not expected that, but he had expected _something_ , damn it. "I was thinking I might kill you. You killed her." It should have been angry, and there was an intensity in it, but of desperation more than rage. The words were also, taken at face value, untrue, yet they held a truth within them. Had Michael Burnham never met Emellia Petrellovitz, things would not have ended up as they had.

"And yet, here we are." She was taunting him.

"Only one thing's keeping you alive right now."

"You need me for something."

Lorca shook his head. "That's not it."

"Michael wouldn't want you to?"

"She liked you," admitted Lorca, "but no." It was satisfying seeing some measure of confusion spread to Petrellovitz. Her ignorance gave him power over her and a renewed sense of confidence.

"She loved me," Petrellovitz replied. "I gave her things you never could."

The sigh that hissed through Lorca's teeth was on some level amused. That was what he had been to Michael relative Georgiou. Petrellovitz thought she could adapt the sentiment for herself. She was wrong. "You were a useful toy. Playtime's over now. That universe you sent us to, Petra? I found us in it. Different versions of us. Which means I've got another you waiting in the wings. You are entirely expendable."

Petrellovitz only stared, enduringly dead-eyed. "Another me? There is no other me. It doesn't matter how many universes there are. There's only one me." It was the defining difference between her and Mischkelovitz: while Mischkelovitz yearned to be part of a group or partnership, Petrellovitz tolerated only singularity. She had gone so far as to kill every other person involved in the QORYA project to ensure it.

"That other you is the only reason you're still standing here. You have a lot in common. Thanks to her, I finally understand what it is made you. I know your secret, Petra. So believe me when I say I don't need you, but if you play nice, I might have a project for you."

Lorca reached into his pocket and pulled out Allan's tooth.

"They've got time travelers in that universe, and this? Is some sort of failsafe for when they get caught. If you're good, I might just give it to you."

He could see she wanted it. The glimmer in her dead eyes was the closest she came to looking alive. Her greed for new advancements and technology was unmatched and she would do anything to obtain such research initiatives for herself.

"So, I have your attention?"

Her insolence vanished in an instant. "Yes, captain."

"Good." He slipped the tooth back into his pocket and smiled. Incentivization worked wonders with her, just as it did Mischkelovitz. The incentives required were orders of magnitude different for each of them; Petrellovitz would no doubt be infuriated to learn the other her could be convinced to work on something for the price of a cookie.

Her eyes followed the tooth as it disappeared into his pocket, entirely fixated on it. Her mind, however, was working several angles at once. "How did you get back?"

"Ship outfitted with a spore displacement drive."

"Ship class?"

"Crossfield."

She looked down, thinking through the implications. "Adapted to accommodate a spore dispersal system, creating a mycelial field large enough to encompass an entire ship. It's what I would have done if they hadn't captured me."

"I know," said Lorca, feeling a sort of pride. "Where do you think I got the idea?"

Petrellovitz looked genuinely annoyed at that. The idea that her intended advancements had been taken from her galled her, even though they were not her advancements in the first place. They were applications of technology she had stolen from Stamets.

"Where is it now?"

"All in good time, Petra. We have more pressing matters. I need you to disable the emperor's control of the Charon's systems."

"Copy," said Petrellovitz, immediately striding past him to the nearest computer console. In the other universe, she was a biomedical engineer with a working knowledge of theoretical physics, her specializations designed to complement the rest of the QORYA project's subjects and support Milosz.

In this universe, there were no other QORYA subjects. She was them all. She was Milosz's theoretical engineering, she was Groves' computer systems knowledge, and also Danica Stewart's robotics and several other specialties possessed by children whose fates in this world had been equally grim. In fact, about the only thing she wasn't was a medical doctor or biomedical specialist, because either thing would have entailed on some level caring about the welfare of others.

The breadth of her skills and knowledge were frightening, but that was not the reason Lorca suppressed a nervous shudder as he watched her go to work. Looking at her, at the scars on her face and neck and hands, he was reminded of the scars on the rest of her.

He could have gone his whole life without knowing those scars were there.

* * *

2250.

She came to him in his ready room and said, "I hate women who use sex as an excuse to stab people in the back. Anyone who cannot earn their position through skill and competency does not deserve that position. However, as a result of this ethos, I have not myself done it, and as you have a reputation in this regard, I am proposing it to you if you are amenable."

He agreed, once the shock of the circumstance wore off, because if she were going to kill him, she would have done so already and in one of a dozen ways that highlighted her scientific prowess.

His requirement was that it be one and done, no expectation of anything further or implication that this meant anything more than what it was. She entirely agreed to this. "I'd prefer it that way," were her exact words.

"Any special requests?" he asked, because whatever she lacked in experience she more than made up for in candor and he half-hoped she'd stumbled across some shamelessly inventive or niche practice that had formed the impetus of this request. He did not expect the response she gave.

"Make it hurt so much I never want to do it again." At his shocked silence to that, she clarified, "It's the best way to ensure my ongoing purity of focus."

He hesitated, not liking the turn this was taking, and she attacked this perceived weakness by taunting him: "The great Captain Lorca can't muster the courage."

"You're insane," he told her.

"Surely you've figured that out by now," she replied and stared at him with her crazily mismatched, unblinking eyes.

He took a fortune cookie from the bowl and held it up. "This'll hurt."

She smiled at that. "I should hope it does."

It did, but not the way either of them intended. That evening, at the agreed-upon time, she arrived and promptly began to undress without fanfare or any interest in the drink he offered.

She had so many scars. They covered almost every inch of her. As Lorca looked at them he wondered where they had all come from, who they had come from. Were they accidents? Were they intentional? Perhaps some were her own work. It was hard to get that many scars without adding some yourself. He tried to focus on the scars to the exclusion of all else and give her what she wanted.

It was too much. Not for Petrellovitz, for Lorca. He withdrew from her and went to the wall, leaning against it with one hand and breathing heavily, his back turned towards her so she could not see his face.

"What is wrong with you," said Petrellovitz, trying to incite his wrath. "Any other man would be glad for the chance to disavow a woman of the instinct to stab him in a shared bed."

Lorca did not answer. He bent his arm and pressed his forehead against it, eyes squeezing shut and fingers tightening into a fist. He was not enjoying this at all. It reminded him too much of being somewhere else, of being with someone else, and the rising terror and panic of that person made his heart flutter with palpitations at memories he had long thought buried.

"Maybe it would help if I had a weapon so you perceived me as a threat."

"Petra, shut up!" He tried but could not rouse anything from within himself that would merit returning to the bed.

"Well, this is disappointing," said Petrellovitz after a few minutes, sitting up and resting her hands on her knees. "I should have asked Michael."

Lorca whirled on her. "Don't you _dare_." He would not have Petrellovitz spoil this for Michael, even if he knew on some level that Michael would have a much easier time providing Petra with what she was asking for and would probably do so without hesitation or heart palpitations or any of the unsettling things Lorca was currently experiencing.

Petrellovitz smiled and perked up, glad for the anger, mistaking it for common jealousy. "That's right, you want to keep Michael all for yourself, don't you? I bet she's better with a broomstick than you are with—"

Lorca lunged for the bed and backhanded Petrellovitz across the cheek with the full force of his arm. She toppled over onto the mattress, blood spitting out the corner of her mouth as her lower lip sliced across her teeth. He grabbed her by the shoulder, pulled his hand back in a fist, and held it ready to strike.

The second strike did not come. He released her. "Get out," he said coldly. She reached for her clothes. He wanted her gone sooner than that, so he snatched her clothes up with one hand, grabbed her arm with the other, and dragged her to the door, throwing both her and the garments into the hall. She stood in the hallway, naked and attracting stares from his guards. She seemed utterly unbothered by this state of affairs. She licked the blood on her lips, picked up her clothes, and walked away without putting them on.

The door slid shut. Lorca sank to the ground beside it. He covered his face with his hands and shook. He did want Michael all to himself, but not for the reasons Petrellovitz thought. He wanted Michael because the way Michael looked at him made him feel like anything was possible, like the person he pretended to be was real.

No, it was more than that. She made him feel like he wasn't pretending at all.

After a moment, the shaking subsided. He dropped his hands from his face and stood and went to the window.

Michael was out there somewhere. There was an ocean of stars between them, but the stars were not between them. The stars were something they shared. As he looked out at the myriad points of light, it felt like she was standing next to him.

* * *

Larsson was still at the door, as ordered. Lorca took him aside. "We might have use for that... pineapple." He hated saying the word. "Where is it?"

"Depends," said Larsson. "Where's Lalana?"

"Nearby and safe," promised Lorca. "Hidden, and we're gonna keep it that way. Understand?"

"Yah. I left the pineapple in O'Malley's workshop. Don't know it's still there, that's where they got me, but that's where I last had it." It was not a part of Lorca's intended plan, so its loss was not a critical blow, but it would have been a handy addition. "O'Malley's dead, by the way."

"Is he now," said a voice behind Lorca. Petrellovitz, inserting herself into the conversation. Larsson gawked at the sight of her.

Petrellovitz was equally appraising of Larsson because she knew for a fact Einar Larsson died aboard the Buran, which could only mean she was looking at a Larsson from another universe.

"I'm sorry for your loss," offered Larsson.

"What loss? This is excellent news. All those times he had me on his table, promising he'd break me, and now he never will." She smiled with delight. "I win!"

Larsson looked at Petrellovitz like she was crazy, which she was, and was disturbed by the fact in this universe O'Malley was his sister's tormentor, not her protector.

"Just hold tight," Lorca instructed, sending Larsson to wait over by the door again and turning his attention to Petrellovitz. "Report?"

She outlined for a moment the computer status. She had disabled universal systems access, restricting both sides to more limited control, which significantly balanced the playing field between the sides and prevented one side from, say, venting the atmosphere on the other.

The next two steps would entail leveling that playing field further. First, Petrellovitz had a few more things to say.

"She was my favorite person, you know. My best friend. My only friend. Did you cry for her?" It was utterly bizarre hearing any part of Colonel O'Malley's words coming out of Petrellovitz's mouth. The two were universes apart and somehow shared an intrinsic commonality. Petrellovitz searched Lorca's eyes for an answer to her question, but rather than complete the survey, she declared what she wanted the answer to be. "Good. At least one of us can."

It was almost verbatim what she had said following their unfortunate encounter, minus the references to Michael. Back then, his response had been a jeering negation of her suggestion because, as awful as he had felt in that moment, he had not cried.

This time, his response was to smile in quiet confidence. He had cried and did not care if she knew it. Besides, he had found his own use for those words while unmaking the incident with Petrellovitz and remaking it with the other version of her. Now when he looked at Petrellovitz, he saw Mischkelovitz with tears in her eyes. Enough to fill an ocean.

"Keep on that computer," he told her, then summoned Landry and Larsson to go over their tactical objectives. "When I give the signal, Larsson, you take the package here."

"There's at least one battalion between here and there." Larsson traced his finger across the intended route.

"We'll take care of it," Lorca assured him.

Larsson frowned, knowing that could only mean a few things, and said, "Too bad Allan's not here. He'd call this 'living history.' Probably get a real kick out of it."

"Hm," was all Lorca said, smiling unreservedly at the fact Allan was never going to get a kick out of anything again. "You have your orders, let's move out. Petra—"

Lorca turned to the console where Petrellovitz was supposed to be and found it deserted. He scanned the crowd. "Where's Petra?"

Landry joined Lorca in this endeavor. "Has anyone seen Lieutenant Commander Petrellovitz!" she shouted.

Shrugs, confusion. No one had. Petrellovitz was gone.


	86. I'll Dream a Nation of You

A/N: We remain in episode 13, "What's Past Is Prologue."

Considering the circumstances of the Mirror Universe and all the available pieces, I think this plan is one actually worthy of Lorca. As a bonus it ties together some details in the show's rendition of events. The redacted Defiant files being on the Shenzhou (why are they on that ship and so heavily redacted to boot), the fact Burnham and Tyler aren't immediately murdered by Sarek and Voq's guards on Harlak... It also reconciles the interactions between Lorca and his interspecies crew (not to mention various actions he took throughout the series which he had no real cause to) with everything he suddenly starts spouting to his followers.

I'm also attempting to answer why Lorca suddenly went from zero to warp speed with what I feel is an entirely plausible explanation of his behavior that fits the facts established in the show. In a weird way, Lorca showed me the answer, because I lived the circumstance described myself while writing this story. It turns out, Lorca really does give everyone what they need. Even this humble writer.

* * *

Luckily, there was a perfectly serviceable alternative to Petrellovitz already on Lorca's itinerary: this universe's Paul Stamets. Lorca wondered if that was part of the reason Petrellovitz had vanished. She and Stamets hated each other. Petrellovitz thought Stamets was a narrow-minded cretin and Stamets hated that she had stolen his life's work and co-opted it for her own endeavors. In this, they were entirely equal their Discovery counterparts. Mischkelovitz had attempted to steal Stamets' mushrooms there, too, after an entertaining little rant about the limits of his knowledge.

Lorca and Landry burst into Stamets' private laboratory aboard the Charon with rifles at the ready, as tactically in sync as they had always been, but found the place seemingly empty.

"Stamets is gone," concluded Landry. "Coward probably left at the first sign of trouble."

As Lorca scanned the room, he did not think that to be the case.

He had made one crucial misjudgment about Discovery's Paul Stamets. That Stamets had something he valued more than mushrooms: Hugh Culber. If not for that, Stamets might have been convinced to travel with Lorca to the ends of that universe, neurological changes and all. Instead he had issued Lorca an ultimatum, "only one more jump," and sealed all their fates.

In this universe, Culber and Stamets had never met. That meant Stamets was entirely the predictable quality Lorca had expected the other Stamets to be.

"All his research is still here," observed Lorca. "I've known more than one Stamets and they both have one thing in common: they love their work too much..."

Lorca's eyes scanned the room, certain something felt off, and then he spotted it. A holographic flicker.

"To leave any of it... _Behind!_ "

He reached through the hologram and found Stamets' neck easily, pulling him out and shoving him up against the bulkhead. "Hello, Paul."

"Gabriel," whined Stamets, in that annoyingly high-pitched tone he had when nervous. "I really hoped you were dead."

"Well you can't always get what you want," said Lorca.

Landry sidled up beside Lorca. "Hi, doc," she said suggestively. She hated eggheads as much as her counterpart in the other universe.

With Landry covering Stamets, Lorca was free to stride across the room as he spoke. "Ironically, I have to thank you for helping me finish what I started. After you sold me out and ruined our coup attempt, I was down on Priors World recruiting allies when the emperor caught up with the Buran. As I beamed back to join the fight, her torpedoes hit. And luckily, so did an ion storm, which caused a transporter malfunction, and... know where I ended up?"

"Frankly, I'm still stuck on the 'not dead' part," said Stamets, shrugging almost comically.

"A parallel universe."

Stamets eyes flicked back and forth as he put it together. "The ion storm must have swapped your transporter signatures." (Stamets still could not see the full extent of what Petrellovitz had done. That was probably for the best.)

"To me, it was physics acting as the hand of destiny. _My_ destiny." He arrived at a spot directly in front of Stamets once more. "The bioweapon you were developing for the emperor. Show it to me."

"Happily, sir," said Stamets.

Months ago, Burnham had stood in front of Lorca on Discovery and accused him of manufacturing biological weapons with the forest of _Prototaxites stellaviatori_ in the cultivation bay. Lorca had never been interested in that line of research at all, but someone else had: Emperor Georgiou.

Georgiou loved biological weapons. The incompatible DNA that had rendered Kerrigan a balloon of gruesome ichor was but one of her many biological toys. The only thing she liked better than bioweapons were blades wielded in her own two hands. Her philosophy, so far as Lorca could tell, was that she liked things which were tactile. If the contact could not be made by a weapon she held, then it ought to be the result of a teeming horde of microscopic things crawling over someone's skin.

It seemed only fitting to wipe out Georgiou's forces with one of her own preferred weapons.

Stamets studied the Charon schematics. Petrellovitz's intervention had given him access to a good deal of the ship. "Looks like we can deploy here, here, and... here. Clear this whole area out." He waved his hands across a large swathe of the ship's midsection.

Lorca nodded. "Get to it."

Stamets was entirely gleeful at the opportunity to finally put his research to work. His spores, seemingly harmless, bypassed the environmental filters and within minutes, two whole battalions headed towards them were rendered a twitching mass of corpses on the ground as the spores ate away at them. Stamets giggled at the sight of it.

Lorca did not linger to watch the display. He had somewhere else he needed to be.

* * *

In the throne room, Emperor Georgiou stood on her dais with arms crossed. The loss of Captain Maddox and the recent deaths of her council left chief operational officer Commander Owosekun in charge of the Charon. (On Discovery, Owosekun was a lieutenant junior grade, several steps removed from command of the ship. Georgiou's habit of killing senior members of her staff tended to allow for rapid advancement. That it also provided Georgiou with the frequent companionship of young, ambitious women was probably no accident.)

Standing to the side, Burnham watched the deployment of the biological spore weapon and felt her every instinct about Lorca back on day one confirmed.

Owosekun deftly summarized unfolding events using what computer access she had. "Sensors have detected mass casualties on decks one through seventeen."

"He's come back from the grave to stage a revolution and that's the best he's got?" sneered Georgiou. "If he keeps doing that, he'll reveal his location. Then he's mine."

Burnham approached Georgiou. "Emperor, I've seen firsthand how he operates. He can get inside your head, manipulate you."

"You think I don't know that?" said Georgiou, insulted. This Michael Burnham seemed to have little to no understanding or respect for Georgiou's years of experience.

"He is baiting you, he wants you to come to him," explained Burnham. "Let me contact my ship again. They have no idea they're flying into a battle zone."

It was the third time she had requested this courtesy and Georgiou was entirely tired of it.

"Please, Philippa," begged Burnham.

Georgiou turned towards Burnham with a look of disgust. "I'm not Philippa to you. But you are right about one thing. He preyed on my sentiment, my weakness for your face. It will not happen again. Take her to the brig."

Imperial guards moved to either side of Burnham, grabbing her arms.

"Your choices have determined your fate," decreed Georgiou.

The guards walked Burnham towards the door. They did not make it far. Burnham kicked out the knees of one, sending him to the floor, and grabbed the rifle of the other, so when the guard fired, it hit another guard nearby. She wrenched the rifle away and slammed the butt of it into the guard's face. The guard on the floor rose and Burnham disabled him with the electrical rod in his own hand, then swung the rifle she was holding so it struck a third guard across the jaw and sent him careening away.

The guards across the room fired at her and Burnham fired back, red bolts of energy throwing sparks. Outnumbered, outgunned, her only chance was to escape somewhere they could not easily follow. Launching into a run, she vaporized a hole into a vent along the floor she had spotted earlier and slid across the polished surface of the Charon's decks into the hole, vanishing into its darkness.

"They'll find her, emperor," promised Owosekun.

Given the maze of access passageways that ran through the walls and floors of the Charon and the systems disabled by Petrellovitz, they did not.

* * *

Landry and her men remained behind with Stamets while Lorca ran his little errand. He found Larsson waiting alone. "Where is she," Lorca asked on approach.

Larsson pointed at a vent along the floor.

"Einar," came Lalana's voice from within as she pushed the vent panel outwards, "you were supposed to say I remained as instructed and did not leave with you." She was colored black like the shadows but rippled to a dusky gold to match the corridor as she emerged.

"And I said this is no time for jokes!" shouted Larsson, exasperated. "Now what the hell is going on, captain."

"The emperor has Burnham captive and we're assisting in the revival of a coup against the emperor to get her back," announced Lorca, having had more than sufficient time to cook up a story.

Larsson looked for a moment like a caveman getting his first glimpse of fire. "What?"

"I'm not repeating myself," said Lorca, leading them down the corridor towards their destination. Lalana loped alongside him.

Larsson shook his head but followed. "Only you would go to another universe and decide to upend a political system."

Lorca shrugged, waving his rifle irreverently. "It's a corrupt system!" he declared, as if that excused this massive, massive overstepping of the spirit of General Order 1, because surely whatever non-interference protocols were to be followed for pre-warp societies also applied to societies that existed outside the known universe and in whose natural development Starfleet ought not to meddle. (They were far, far beyond this, of course. They had been ever since the Defiant crossed over into this world. Its presence had altered history.)

"In the ten years I have known you, this is the most ridiculously convoluted plan you have ever had. Makes me think it might actually work."

Lorca smiled at that.

They arrived at a communication station. Lorca hit the door controls and fired upon the technician inside. She slumped over her console. "Guard the hall," he ordered Larsson.

"Aye, sir," grumbled Larsson, thoroughly annoyed to think he had left a perfectly good retirement of fishing to spend the past several months guarding doors, which was even worse than the brig and armory duties he had been assigned during his first tour of service.

Lorca kicked the technician's corpse out of her chair and began to key in commands. Lalana watched him disable several security protocols and key in a subspace band. "What precisely are we doing here?"

"It isn't enough to cut the head off the snake," said Lorca. "We have to flay her alive."

Now that he knew the full extent of the pieces on the gameboard, the time had come to gather them in one place.

More than that, as he revived this element of the plan they had built together, it felt like she was with him again.

* * *

They sat in the privacy of Michael's quarters with the lights comfortably dim around them. Lorca could scarcely believe his ears. Some part of him hoped he had misheard because if he had heard correctly, it was doom for them both. His voice was a gently lilting admonishment, but more amused than anything else. "Michael. That's treason."

"My loyalty," she said, her eyes fixed on his with a dark fire so bright it really was threatening to destroy them both, "is to the empire."

There was really something impossible about her, he decided, staring at her across the coffee table. "The emperor _is_ the empire."

Her head tilted to the side, a smile on her lips. "The _emperor_ is entirely too shortsighted."

Lorca closed his eyes a moment and shook his head. With anyone else, this action could have been a deadly folly, but Michael was the one person he could close his eyes on and not worry what he would find when he opened them because when he opened them, he saw the same ready smile, the same cocky confidence, and the same wildness he had always known—and not a trace of malice towards him in any of it. Well, maybe the slightest trace of malice, but only enough as to make things interesting between them where it counted.

He was only questioning her because he had to be sure. Not of her loyalty—he was sure of that—but of her thoughtfulness. This was not an endeavor to be undertaken lightly. He needed her to prove to him that she had considered it as thoroughly as he had. She had fifteen years of catchup to do in that regard.

"Here," said Michael, and tipped more scotch into his cup. She pushed it towards him across the surface of the table, clinking her own glass against his commandingly.

"There's no amount of alcohol's gonna make this sound a good idea," he warned her, but took the drink anyway.

"Be honest," she said. "I know you see it just like I do. The empire is stagnant. The emperor hasn't done anything important in half a decade. Twenty more years of this and the empire will be shot to shit."

Being almost twice as old as her, he had a much better concept of what twenty years meant, not to mention an idea of how short a time period five years was. Twenty was almost how old he had been when she was born. Twenty and five was a birthday she had enjoyed very recently. That she was unwilling to wait twenty years when he had spent nearly that many setting this all up was chock full of the abominable irony of her youth. Did she realize how ridiculous her time frames might sound from his perspective? Of course not, because when he was her age, twenty years had seemed like the number of years between then and the end of life as he knew it. Back then, he had known that people over forty were _old_ as surely as he knew anything. Only having lived through those twenty years did he gain the perspective to know twenty was an entirely doable number for someone her age and probably an overestimate of the emperor's longevity on her part.

He also knew what she was talking about because he had played no small part in putting these very ideas in her head. He loved the way she phrased it. There was a lot of him in her sentiments, but the words were her own. He smiled despite the danger. "Let's say I agree with you—"

"Because you do."

He chuckled faintly. She was right, of course, there was no hiding it. "Then what would you have us do about it? And be realistic, I've taught you that much." Among many other things.

As she outlined her idea—based on a theory he was not sure he accepted—he had to admit it was at the very least ambitious. Startlingly so.

"They would never expect it," she grinned, "from the Butcher of the Binary Stars."

"The question is if you can sell them on this little theory of yours. Or sell them on anything. Let's not forget you _are_ the Butcher of the Binary Stars." The title was so recently earned he could not imagine it would go down well at all with her intended allies of convenience.

Her eyes were like the depths of space, tiny reflections from the lights in the room twinkling as stars upon their glassy surface. "I don't have to sell them on anything. That's your job."

"Oh, I have a job in this little future of yours!" he went, a little too loudly because half that bottle of scotch was already in his bloodstream.

Michael came shooting across the table at him, her hands pressing down on his kneecaps as she leaned her face in so close to his he could smell the scotch on her breath. Every bit of this amazing him. To think this was the same child that had been hiding beneath the table at the banquet eighteen years ago. She never hid now. She was utterly brazen in everything she did. "The Graysons," she said.

That made perfect sense. The Graysons were wealthy and powerful and it was no secret the daughter of the family, Amanda, had certain proclivities where aliens were concerned. Her half-Vulcan son Spock was proof of that. That Spock still lived was a favor Lorca still held in his back pocket, ready for the right moment to cash it in.

But was this that moment? "What is your obsession with that half-breed," Lorca sneered, intending it in jest, but his face showed more jealousy than he wanted to admit. (Her obsession with Spock had begun as jealousy for his attention. Now he was the jealous one.)

"That half-breed," said Michael, sliding her hands up his thighs, "has more potential in his pointy ears than half the fleet combined. I will not have him take what is rightfully mine." Whatever barrier Spock's Vulcan blood offered could be offset by the wealth and power of his relations under the right circumstances. "All you have to do is bring my proposal to the Graysons and ensure that it reaches the right pointy ears."

That shifted Lorca into a smug smile. The Graysons were a perfect idea. _His_ perfect idea. He had steered her towards it with such care she thought it her own. His existing relationship with the family gave him the clout to make introductions and sell this proposal both because of and despite Michael's own reputation.

He could also recognize a threat to himself when he heard one. "Phrased like that, makes me worry you might replace me with your pointy-eared rival when it turns out your little theory's no good."

"Oh, it's beyond good," she said. The Defiant was legendary in the empire. That ship, fallen through time from another universe, had given Hoshi Sato the power to conquer the empire a century ago. It would, under the right circumstances, give Lorca and Michael that power, too. "Just imagine it. A world bursting with potential." (The place her hand went with this particular word choice was entirely distracting.) "This is how we use it. And once we've separated the wheat from the chaff, this world will be ours for the taking."

He could hear some of his own words in that, and he had certainly planted the seeds of this whole undertaking, but he had to admit the particulars of Michael's approach were entirely novel and unexpected. She surprised him so often. Always somehow in a good way.

He was doomed, he decided, and glad for it. He traced a hand up the side of her body and down her arm to her wrist, fingers stroking gentle circles. She made the impossible seem possible. That was important because the task ahead of them was as impossible as they came.

"You could always just wait twenty years," he whispered to her. He said it not because he believed it but because he wanted to hear her say what followed.

"Why spend twenty years waiting when we can spend twenty ruling," she countered. That was the word he loved the most. _We_. She was the only person who ever said it and made him believe it. "And when you're short on time, the answer is to look for space."

She was, in a very real sense, trying to do just that. _When you have no time, look to space, and when you have no space, look to time._ It was an odd little conflation of some scientific explanation which Michael had taken as her personal mantra.

"It's gonna take a miracle," he said after a long, thoughtful, self-satisfied moment. It was as much an offer as a counterpoint. She accepted that offer and sealed it with her lips.

Luckily, miracles were his specialty. She was living proof of that. A child under a table turned into something worthy of her name, a name that mirrored his own. They were the pair of them archangels, though what they did next was anything but heavenly.

* * *

Lalana watched Lorca with patient curiosity. There was something written on his face right now, something bitter and regretful, but equally something that was hopeful and beautiful. A memory. She marveled at how such a simple palette could convey so many things at once and with such constant intensity that even she, a nonhuman, could see the colors. There was no one else who equaled him in this regard. Some humans expressed with the same intensity, some with the same breadth of range, but none of them, so far as she could tell, with both these things always, the way he did. He was the one human whose emotions were never a mystery to her.

The beep of a response took Lorca out of his momentary daze. "Finally," he hissed at the console, and accepted the transmission.

"Gabriel Lorca," said a calm, flat, almost toneless voice.

Lorca smiled in confident satisfaction. "Sarek."

That was the extent of the pleasantries between them.

"You are lucky this subspace band was still being monitored. It was slated for decommission." It was among the subspace bands the rebels had turned over to Burnham to supply the emperor as proof of her success. "It may not be safe."

"It doesn't have to be," said Lorca. "I'm sending you the coordinates of the Charon."

Sarek stared at Lorca. There was something frustrating about the stare of a fully cold-blooded Vulcan. Intensely dispassionate. "We are in no position to launch an assault. Our base on Harlak was recently destroyed, or did you not realize that when you sent us Michael Burnham?"

"I don't need you to attack the Charon," said Lorca, "because by the time you get here, the ship will be mine. I just need you to help me clean up the mess."

The same impassive stare. "You have been gone for too long, Gabriel. Many things have changed in your absence."

Lorca leaned forward on the console, fixing Sarek with a look of intensity that would have melted anyone else. He was simultaneously cold and furious as he said through gritted teeth, "Don't you dare. I didn't endure that goddamn _mind rape_ for you to back out now that I've given you proof." His fingers gripped the console's edge so tightly his arms shook slightly.

* * *

"A bold plan," said Sarek, "if it is indeed true."

"Oh, it's true," assured Lorca. "You can take my word for it."

Lorca, Sarek, and Voq were standing in a single pressurized chamber aboard an abandoned asteroid mining facility. Of the two parties, Lorca was by far the more exposed. He was here without any backup, his ship out of transporter and weapons range, while their cruiser hovered above with the capacity to blow the meeting place to kingdom come and kidnap or send him with it. It was entirely intentional: Lorca potentially had the might of a whole empire behind him, so he was negotiating from a position of power, while Voq and Sarek represented a scattered mass of disenfranchised species. For Lorca to come alone and unarmed was merely balancing those factors out and proving the sincerity of his intent.

Voq sniffed disdainfully. "Take the word of a human?" he said. His voice had a honking quality to it.

"Or don't. You have the files Michael sent. That's proof enough."

"They were heavily redacted," said Sarek.

The files they referred to were the Defiant reports. Michael had secreted copies away aboard her ship, the Shenzhou, and transmitted them to the rebels alongside the promise of her plan. Minus any incriminating details, of course. Minus any useful details. The files were only intended to demonstrate the existence of Michael's conceit and get the rebels to the table.

"If we gave you everything, you wouldn't need us," countered Lorca easily.

Sarek was unmoved. "And yet, it remains possible that this is all a subterfuge on your part."

Lorca crossed his arms and glared at Sarek. "After everything I've done for your son?" There was a reason the half-breed progeny of Amanda Grayson and Sarek still drew breath and Lorca was part of it. As far as he was concerned, Sarek owed him a lot for that particular favor, even if it had been done more for the Graysons' sake than the Vulcan's.

To any of a dozen other races, such a personal gesture would have meant something, but Vulcans were not known for their sentimentality. "Be that as it may, we must confirm your intentions personally." Sarek raised his hands and stepped towards Lorca.

Lorca uncrossed his arms and stepped back, one hand going to where his phaser would have been. Of course, he had no phaser with him, and going for the knife in his boot was too obvious and would destroy the entire pretense of this meeting.

"If you consent willingly, this will be much easier," said Sarek. "But if you will not, there are ways around this."

Voq drew a Klingon blade from his hip, an ancient relic scavenged from the ruins of Qo'noS that still looked deathly sharp despite its dusty origins.

"Do not fight us, Gabriel," warned Sarek. "If you truly desire this union of our interests, then this is our price."

Lorca's back pressed against the wall of the chamber as Sarek's hands pressed against his head. His hands closed around Sarek's wrists because he could not totally escape the instinct to flee or to take hold of a weapon during a moment of perceived weakness and neither option was available, so all he could do was find something, anything to hold on to.

" _My mind to your mind. My thoughts to your thoughts._ "

Sarek slipped into Lorca's mind. It felt like a million tiny little needles were pressing into his brain and splaying the memories out as a scientist spreads out a specimen for dissection. Lorca could feel himself being turned inside-out and was half-aware of a yell in his throat, but then all awareness was gone and he felt only Sarek everywhere—inside and outside, upon him and within him. He could not tell where he began and ended because there was no _him_ , only Sarek. He was drowning in a Vulcan consciousness. He could see and feel his memories unspooling like ribbons in the darkness. He reached for them and they eluded him, slipped away into Sarek's waiting embrace.

Sarek released him and Lorca slid down along the wall, yell replaced by a wordless gasp. He knew instinctively that Sarek had seen it all: every truth, every lie, every secret, including the ones Lorca kept from himself. He felt stripped of everything. He was nothing in the aftermath of it.

"He is sincere," said Sarek, "and the Defiant is no lie, but he also does not believe the deal he has offered is possible."

"The usual human treachery," Voq concluded, looking angry enough to spit.

Sarek considered that. "Not quite. He does not believe it possible, but the one who sent the information, Michael Burnham, does believe it, and they have a scientist who is working on making it possible."

Lorca closed his eyes and took deep breaths to steady himself. He was better than this. He was _stronger_ than it. He slowly rose to his feet, finding himself physically steady even if his mind remained unbalanced.

"What they believe is of no consequence," said Voq. "If they cannot provide what they offer, it is as good as a lie."

"I'll prove it," Lorca gasped at them. "If I can prove it, then we have a deal?"

"You will prove something which you believe to be impossible?" queried Sarek.

Lorca inhaled deeply and was entirely resolute as he said, "I've done more with less."

Sarek looked to Voq. "Then I believe this deal is in our best interests. If you prove the barrier between the worlds may be safely pierced and allow us this... 'world bursting with potential,' then we will help you supplant the emperor."

Voq extended his arm to Lorca. Lorca swallowed and clasped Voq's forearm. A warrior's pact. For better or worse, their destinies were now tied.

* * *

 _A world bursting with potential_. The words had been Michael's, but they had come to Sarek through Lorca, stripped out of his consciousness by a mind meld so thorough it had, for a moment, made the two of them seem one. That Sarek still held those words was both damning and propitious.

Lorca hated that memory more than almost anything. What was supposed to be a mere confirmation of his and Michael's intentions had instead become a brutal exposure of everything he was. It was not acceptable to Lorca that this event should have been for nothing. Not now that he had given Sarek the very proof requested in the form of the other universe's Michael Burnham and in his own return here.

"I held up my end of the bargain," said Lorca through clenched teeth, "now you hold up yours."

"In your long absence, I find myself doubtful as to the enduring sincerity of your intentions. Now that you have this power, what is to stop you from claiming both universes for your own?"

Lorca was taken momentarily aback by the accusation. The thought had crossed his mind. At this point, a lot of thoughts had, many of them in conflict with one another, and his end game had changed a few times over the past year, but circumstances had forced him back on track and he was resolved to his original course of action. With a few adjustments. Even if he had ended up with a slightly different set of goals, the fact remained none of it conflicted with Michael's offer to Sarek and the rebels.

"If you submit to another mind meld—"

"Absolutely _not_ ," said Lorca, hating Sarek for even suggesting it. "You've _seen_ what I did over there, Sarek. I saved the other you. That has to count for something."

"I suspect because it felt like saving yourself."

Lorca's mouth twitched. This was true. Something the Vulcan had done during that mind meld made Lorca unable to stomach the idea of Sarek in distress because some part of him still felt like Sarek. The kinship was unwanted, but it was there. An intentionally implanted extra failsafe against the dissolution of their intended union. Some part of Lorca wondered if it was somehow part of Sarek's _katra_ , but the larger part of him said no. Simple subliminal manipulation on Sarek's part. There might be some way to escape it, but seeking help would mean admitting the link's existence, and if word of it got out, Lorca would be finished on far too many fronts.

Besides, when he had learned Sarek raised Michael Burnham in the other universe, it had seemed like proof of something else. That Lorca and Sarek, the men who raised Michael Burnham, would be reflected across the two universes by such a bond suggested the two universes were united by a thread of shared destiny.

"Or maybe I'm just not the xenophobe you think," said Lorca, moving aside. "Lalana, get up here."

She hopped onto the seat into view of the transmission. Anyone else and the transmission would have been automatically framing her in the whole time, but since the computer did not register her as a life form, she had to rely on being in front of Lorca for Sarek to see her.

"What is that?" went Sarek, cold Vulcan façade letting slip some small bit of surprise mingled with the faintest affront or disgust at the two giant eyes.

"I am a lului. My name is Lalana."

Lorca looked entirely pleased with himself for putting this together. "She's my ally. That's proof I'm not lying. I have no problem working with aliens."

"You are from the other universe?" asked Sarek, because certainly he had never seen her like here.

"Yes, that is correct."

Sarek already knew from his mind meld with Burnham that the other universe had the potential to offer safe haven to anyone who wished it and had seen some glimmer of Lorca's involvement with Discovery's interspecies crew, but nowhere in Burnham's mind had he seen this creature. "What are you to Captain Lorca? In what way do you prove his intent?"

"I am his friend. As for his intent, what is it you wish of him?"

"He has promised to provide safe passage for non-humans to your universe."

Lalana tilted her head up at Lorca. "You said we were going to stop the war with the Klingons by bringing reinforcements from the Empire."

Sarek's glare looked entirely unamused. Lorca realized immediately where the problem lay. The first night here, when Lalana had approached him in his quarters, he had outlined a perfectly plausible plan involving killing Georgiou, taking over the Empire, and using Terran ships to fight the Klingons. While the Terran Empire and Starfleet were fundamentally incompatible, the prospect of a mutual alien enemy could have rallied the bloodthirsty Terrans to answer the call to war. They were as glory-hungry as the Klingons in Lalana's universe.

Nowhere in that plan had Lorca mentioned Sarek, Voq, and the rebels. To be honest, he was a little surprised they were still in play. He had expected to find them largely quashed by Georgiou at this point. That they endured was a testament to their value and made them worth adding back into his plan as participants rather than face them as a later adversary.

Lorca grimaced in disappointment at Lalana. Mentioning this in front of Sarek felt like a public betrayal. (In actuality, he was learning something the other Lorca had learned long ago: Lalana had no sense of propriety and did not distinguish between conversations in an official and informal context. She spoke whatever came into her mind.) "When we arrived here, I didn't know Sarek and Voq were still alive. Terrans or rebels, a gun is a gun."

Lalana's tail flicked. "Sometimes I think you are making this up as you go along."

That was _entirely_ a betrayal. "Circumstance changed and I'm adjusting, restoring part of the original plan. That's not the same as _making it up_."

"It is almost. And what if the Klingons here wish to join the Klingons over there?"

Was she _trying_ to screw this up for him? "Then we don't send the Klingons until after the war's won. If we have to send a few Terrans to clear a few battles, we do that. The important thing is we get Georgiou out of the way right now. Trust me, Sarek, I've thought of everything."

Lalana continued her dissension. "No one can think of everything, not even me, and I have trillions more brain cells than you do, Gabriel."

Lorca pressed his fingers to the bridge of his nose. She was talking about her undifferentiated tissues, which he knew from the lului medical report tended to be memory-focused, not cognitive. While the cells could provide cognitive function, they were sluggish compared to the specialized cortex cells that comprised the lului "brain" and infrequently used in such a capacity. He pulled his hand away and practically exploded at her. "This isn't the time for discussion! We have a chance right now to rid ourselves of Georgiou once and for all. The emperor's on her knees, and when she's gone, we all get what we want. But we need to do this _now_. Before someone else comes in to fill the power vacuum I'm about to create."

"Hm, that is a fair point," went Lalana, entirely unperturbed by Lorca's frustration. She turned back to the screen. "Sarek, will you please bring your ships to assist in this endeavor, for the benefit of your universe and mine?"

Sarek got the distinct impression there was something in this argument between Lorca and Lalana that was wholly domestic, which was more telling than anything Lorca could have actually said. He still needed more. In a measured tone, he said, "And who would you have replace the emperor? You?"

"I can't think of a better candidate," said Lorca as if he were congratulating Sarek for suggesting he take on this role rather than confirming an obvious bit of hubris.

"What of Michael Burnham?"

Lorca dismissed this suggestion outright. "It can't be Burnham. She doesn't know this universe. Her idealism will lead us nowhere. The minute they realize who and what she is, she's done for."

"And yet, it is in her idealism that I find hope for this plan, not yours."

Lorca glowered, thinking they were at an impasse.

Then Sarek said, "I was able to convince Voq of the sincerity of Burnham's intentions, even with the destruction of Harlak. I equally understand the validity of your concerns. I have seen into this Michael Burnham." That was a misleadingly innocuous description of a mind meld as far as Lorca was concerned. "She is not from this world and she cannot lead your people effectively. A new emperor is not worth the trouble if she is dead within a year. I suggest an alternative. I will back you, Voq will back you, if she stands by your side."

Lorca took a deep breath. That was, in fact, the best thing he could have hoped for. "Agreed." In a way, this Burnham was even better, because she would be sincere in a way his Michael could never have been. Lorca would have Sarek eating out of the palm of his hand.

"Then we will proceed to your coordinates."

Lorca leaned his hands against the back of the chair, feeling a great weight lift from his shoulders.

Lalana put her hands on the edge of the console and leaned forward. "Gabriel and I thank you, Sarek."

"I have only one question remaining. What of the Michael Burnham from our world?" asked Sarek.

A long pause. "Dead," said Lorca.

"Then you have my condolences," said Sarek, because he knew exactly how much Michael Burnham meant to Lorca. He knew it better than anyone.

The channel closed. Lorca exhaled, then erupted, "What the hell was that? You torpedoed me!"

"Vulcans are more easily convinced when they watch a successful defense of a position. I forced you to defend."

He blinked. That hardly seemed to excuse it. "Maybe next time a little warning?"

"You might have said we were contacting a Vulcan. As it was, you did not mention any part of this to me."

"I've been a little busy," he pointed out. He meant to tell her, but between Discovery and here, he had not had much chance to. Moving between the torture chamber and the aft hangar bay, they had been too busy ducking security, and in the brief minute before the transmission started, he had forgotten.

"It turned out well in the end," said Lalana. "Sarek is coming. I think he was reassured that you had me as an ally, and I think it is a very good plan." Now, not only was he uniting forces against a shared enemy, he was offering a chance for something better to the teeming masses of the oppressed.

That it would simultaneously remove what Terrans saw as an alien scourge on their claim of galactic supremacy was an additional windfall from Lorca's perspective. They would keep some quantity of aliens, because the Empire still had uses for many, but the rebels at least would be gone, and any species that fulfilled no Imperial purpose along with them. Best of all, they would go willingly.

"Thank you." Holding her up as a reassurance for Sarek was not the main reason he had summoned Lalana to the Charon, but it had been an entirely intentional move on his part and worked beautifully despite them both.

"Though, I should have cleaned your face before we contacted Sarek. You look quite a mess." There was still blood caked down the side of his cheek from the wounds he had given himself smashing his head against the wall of the ready room on Discovery. They had not healed much in the ensuing days of torture. Her tail drifted up towards him to clean them now.

Lorca grabbed her tail, stopping her. "Don't. People might notice."

Lalana's tail twisted slightly in his grasp. "What do you mean? They will notice there is less blood on your face?"

"Exactly, and if they figure out how..."

"They will think you cleaned your face."

"Yes, but how!" he exclaimed, voice rising. "I can't have them figuring out you're here. They'll shoot you. You understand?"

She did understand, but what she understood was not the point he thought he was trying to make. She would have blinked in confusion if only she could. Instead she stared at him and realized exactly how bad this situation was.

She had seen it, back in the torture chamber, with Maddox and Allan both. The same manic delight that had consumed him during null time, the sort of delight that overwhelmed people when they were forced to operate for far too long on far too little: a combination of sleep deprivation and adrenaline that induced a state of mind where suddenly everything in the universe seemed to make perfect sense. That point where you see all the patterns and feel you are suspended in something approaching total clarity.

A dangerous clarity, because often the patterns you saw in this state were not the sort of stable connections that made sense in the light of a more well-rested day.

She asked him the same question she had asked almost two hours ago.

"Gabriel, when was the last time you slept?"

They had been on the Charon for about half a day now, and before that, on the Shenzhou for over three. During that time, while Burnham had endured fitful but uninterrupted sleep in the relative comfort of the captain's quarters, Lorca had slept at most a handful of hours between being tortured in the agonizer booth. Four days on perhaps that many hours of sleep.

"I'm fine."

"I think you need to sleep."

Now she was being annoying. "Lalana, there's no time. We need to finish what we started. We're so close now."

"I also have a question about the conclusion of this."

There were a thousand other things he had to worry about right now, an entire coup he needed to attend to, but still he asked, "What?"

"Is it your intent that you remain here while nonhumans are sent to my universe?"

"That is the gist of it, yeah." He sounded enduringly proud about it.

"Including me?"

Lorca froze.

The main reason he had called Lalana to the Charon was that he knew he needed backup in order to reach Georgiou and kill her. Lalana's unique properties meant she could infiltrate any corner of the vessel and help him at a moment's notice. She had done exactly that.

Problem was, when he called her with those two little words, "lab rats," he had not known there existed an entire hangar of people loyal to him in need of rescue. He knew some of his people were aboard—Petrellovitz, for example, had been listed as such in the recovered data core—but an entire hangar full of them? It was too good to be true.

Once he knew they were on the Charon, freeing them became his top priority.

There was a reason his people were loyal to him after two hundred days of torture, a reason they loved him and said he loved them in return.

He did.

Not in the way he loved Michael, there was no one he loved like Michael, but in a way that made them feel valued. While Georgiou constantly culled from the top, Lorca kept people around. (Even in the other universe. It was why he let Tyler remain on Discovery.) Maybe he was not always kind, maybe he could be a tyrant, but he was a tyrant who kept them safe. So long as they were loyal to him, he was loyal to them. His people did not fear him the way Georgiou's people feared her. In this universe, that was as close to love as most people ever got.

He knew firsthand what it was like to exist as part of Georgiou's high command, to never be certain from one day to the next whether this was the day you would die or not, sometimes for no crime beyond being in the wrong place at the wrong moment. For years he stood by her side and watched her pick people off one by one and in sudden clusters. The dance it took to avoid being victim to Georgiou's wrath was exhausting. The longer he lasted, the more exhausting it became. That his number would eventually come up seemed inevitable. Each new death brought him one step closer to his own.

Once Michael entered the picture, there were two of them to worry about. He did not think Georgiou would ever hurt Michael given her feelings for Michael's mother, but so many people had made the mistake of thinking Georgiou would not hurt them and paid the ultimate price, Michael's mother among them. Lorca had even made that mistake once himself. His price had not been fatal, but it had given him a dark and festering wound for which Michael had proven to be the only salve. If not Michael herself, then the role she offered him, which had allowed him to lose himself and become someone else completely.

In the wake of Michael's death, his only thought had been to destroy the woman that had driven them both down this awful path together. It remained a central aim, but little by little, other desires had found him again. The desire to travel the stars, the desire to win a war, the desire to be a captain, the desire to save his people. The desire to live on as a testament to his Michael Burnham.

His people needed him and he needed them.

His people would not understand Lalana. They were Terrans through and through. They hated nonhumans. Not only would they not understand Lalana, her very presence undermined his credibility with them.

It was bad enough he had been secretly enlisting the rebels against Georgiou. He could sell this fact to his followers in the context of his long-term goals so long as he always seemed to keep the rebels at a distance in an antiseptic alliance of convenience.

There was nothing antiseptic about Lalana.

"Yes," he said. "Especially you."

"That is not acceptable."

"Well I'm sorry you feel that way," he drawled at her, "but fact is, you've done what I needed you to, so take Larsson and head on back to Discovery."

"But we have not yet killed the emperor."

"Lalana. This is the end of the road for you and me. It's time to say goodbye."


	87. Captain Lorca

A/N: We remain in episode 13, "What's Past Is Prologue."

* * *

They stood in the communications room, a corpse sprawled on the floor next to the chair in front of the console, Lorca standing behind the chair and Lalana perched on the seat facing backwards towards him. She tightened her fingers around the sides of the chair's back to keep from knocking her hands together.

"I do not wish to say goodbye. I would like to see this through. I believe I have earned that."

"I'm grateful for everything you've done, but there's nothing left for you to do here. So _go_."

"I think it would be best if I stayed."

"Believe me, it wouldn't. I don't need you anymore. I've got Landry now, and she and I go way back. You're... unnecessary." The cocky confidence came through in spades.

"I will return to Discovery when you do."

That statement surprised him. Surely she did not think he was going back there at this point. "That ship has sailed."

"Discovery is a starship, Gabriel. It does not sail, it flies."

Of course she would say something like that. "It's an expression, it means..." He shook his head and sighed exaggeratedly. She was impossible sometimes. All the time, really. "Lalana, listen to me. Just _go_. You don't belong here and I don't want you here. You'll only get in the way. I can't be looking out for you and it isn't safe."

Lalana released her grip on the chair. Her hands were in no danger of knocking now. She pressed her fingers lightly together. "You are more like Hayliel than you know. He tried to do the same thing. He told me to go to Trill and stay there because of the war. I went to the Klingon homeworld instead. In matters like this, neither of you have ever understood me, but I do not care because I love your face. I have only seen one face like yours, but I have seen it twice now, and I do not think I will be able to find it a third time. Lului do not believe in third chances."

Lorca stared at her. This was not happening. "Lalana, I'm telling you—no, I'm ordering you to go back to Discovery."

He could try, but pretending to be his subordinate was a game she had only ever played with the man she called Hayliel. "I am not leaving you behind."

"Yes, you are."

Lalana stood up on the chair so her face was level with his and said in a tone the translator rendered as louder and more intense than he had imagined her voice could be: "You don't get to decide that. That's not how this works."

He could hear himself in those words, even though he had not been the one to speak them to her. He could feel it innately, those were his words coming out of her mouth, and he could well imagine why he would have spoken them to her, because they were expressing the exact same sentiment he was trying to speak to her now.

Hearing the other Lorca's words gave him an idea as to how to get rid of her. "I'm not the man you fell in love with. He's dead and it's time you accepted that fact."

"But you do have his face, and you are almost as wonderful."

How was this not working. Lorca took a deep breath, straightened, and summoned up every bit of indignation and fury he held within him not just towards her but concerning everything he hated in two universes. His voice emerged as a snarl of hatred, "Do you have any idea the revulsion I feel every time I touch you? You disgust me. I can't stand the sight of you. You're not human. You're—you're an animal! A freak! If your kind were in this universe, I'd have them exterminated like the vermin they are. Wouldn't even eat them."

Her head merely tilted and her fingers spun slightly. These were not effective insults. "I know you felt that way at first. It was very obvious to me how much I disturbed you. It was written all over your face. But despite that, you still tried. That made me so very proud."

He threw his hands up in a move that was every bit identical to the Captain Lorca she had known. "What the hell are you saying! Do you really not understand? I lied! I tricked you and everybody in your universe, but mostly you!"

"How could you trick me? I have known who you are from the beginning."

"You still fell right into my trap. I got you to help me pretend to be him. It was all an act, and you fell for it hook, line, and sinker."

"I have known who you really are ever since you called each and every one of the families of the crew of the Buran."

His head shook. "I was just keeping up appearances. Had to do what your captain would have done."

"But you could not have done it you did not feel it. Because that is how your face works. You cannot hide the things you feel. That is why people believe you. Because you tell the truth, even if it is slightly repurposed."

What would it take to convince her? "You stupid—I've been using you! This whole time!"

"No, Gabriel, I have been using you. You have my favorite human face. I love the stories I read there. Do you know what story I am reading right now?"

"I assume you're going to tell me?" he drawled in frustration, because he had long since learned it was almost impossible to get Lalana to shut up.

"You are attempting to make me angry so that I leave you, because you think you are saving me if you do, but you do not understand. I do not require saving. I only require your face."

Over and over and over again she returned to that point. It was a good face, obviously, it had gotten him plenty of women over the years, but the level of loyalty it evoked in Lalana went beyond that into something that defied all logic. It was obsession, as deep and thorough as his obsession for Michael Burnham.

"Want to know a secret?" Lorca jeered. "I killed him. I killed your captain and his crew. And I'd do it again."

Lalana's hands began knocking together then. Even he now knew this meant distress, but she did not let it stop her. Her voice remained calm and kind. "You did kill them. But you did not take away the face I loved, and even though you could have sent me away, you kept me." Her hands stilled. "And that is not your secret. I know your secret. I can read it on your face."

He shook his head again, this time in disbelief. "What secret would that be? There are so many." He stated this in an almost manic fashion, as if he were making fun of her, which he was.

"Oh, Gabriel, you have only one secret. It is not that you came to our world from another, or that you killed the man who shared your face, or that you are a bad person. Your secret is that you wanted to be the man you killed. Not just in name, not just in face, but in action. Because you loved being Gabriel Lorca in our world. You loved it more than being yourself. And I think, had not Katrina Cornwell tried to take Discovery from you, that you would have kept being him for as long as you could."

He stared at her with something akin to terror. His head shook in denial. "No." It was almost a whisper. His eyes burned, as they sometimes did when exposed to sudden, bright light, but the room was entirely dim. The word turned into a plea, " _No_." His face began to twist and his vision blurred. He was beyond exhausted and unable to stop what was happening.

"It is all right. I forgive you for killing him. I forgive you for all of it. And you are him, because you have earned yourself a love that will follow you forever."

There were tears in his eyes. He started to back away and tripped over the outstretched hand of the communications tech on the ground, stumbling backwards onto the floor. The phaser rifle slipped from his fingers and the jolt of the impact drove the breath out of his lungs and made him cough for air.

"But I don't love you!" he blurted up at her, his breaths shaking in his chest.

She hopped down from the chair to his side in one easy motion. Amazingly, her tongue clicked. She found that funny. "I am not speaking of me. You are lovely, Gabriel, but I love my captain. And the things we shared, I do not share with you. You were not with us on the Triton, on Tederek, Luluan, the Buran, the Gabriella, Risa, Earth, or any of the many worlds we shared. I gave you those stories so that you would know who he was, who you had killed, and I am glad that I did, because it showed you how to become the person you are now. A person I am proud to call my friend. And I am your friend and I will always help you. You need only let me."

His shoulders shook and he covered his face with his hands and began to quietly sob. These were not tears like he had cried onto Cornwell's shoulder back in San Francisco, when he had conjured up the saltwater he felt over the recent loss of Michael as a display to induce Cornwell to his side so she would give him Discovery. They were different, too, from the tears of angry loss he had cried in the moment for Michael. He had never cried like this before. The other Gabriel had, in a moment he knew only from a story, but not him. These tears were his, genuinely his, and he did not want them.

The awful truth was he did want to be the other Gabriel. Even with the war, Michael had been right: there was so much potential in that other universe. In this universe, the fact his crew loved him was an aberration. In the other universe, it verged on standard operating procedure. That the crew of Discovery did not love him to the same extent was largely a result of the fact he did not have the skill set and understanding to produce this effect in them. The people in the other universe did not fall in love with the first person who made them feel less afraid because they did not live in a state of constant fear.

The broad end of Lalana's tail settled against his hair, stroking it with the delicacy of a summer breeze. "I will take you back there. And I will tell Admiral Cornwell that she was wrong and I will run with you through the stars and we will have so many adventures, just like I did with him. We will run together. I told him once, when he told me that he was running away, that it did not matter so long as we were running in the same direction. That is still true. We are running together right now. And everyone else is running with you, too. Saru, Macarius, Emellia, John, Einar, even Paul..." She did not list Michael Burnham because she did not want to make this harder than it already was.

He wanted to go back more than anything. That world was awful, and bright, and he had killed the man who deserved to live in it, and he missed it terribly. There were so many things to do and see. It was a universe so much bigger than this one. A universe where when someone asked you for a sparring match, it wasn't an excuse to stab you in the back. Where when you struck your head against a table and there was blood staining half your face, someone who didn't even like you tended to your wounds and stayed with you to make sure you were safe. Where people did not sleep with guns under their pillows—they did not need that reassurance. Where people followed you because they respected and admired your rank, not because they were afraid of how you'd obtained it. Where an alien gave you a story because she liked your face. He wanted so much to belong there, to be a part of it.

Cornwell had put an end to that. When it became clear she and Terral were going to take Discovery from him, it had driven him back to the original plan he had tried to abandon. As much as that meant returning for the people he had left behind and cared about in some way and wanted to save and fulfill a promise to, he wanted so fervently to have stayed in the other world. He wanted it, selfishly, for his own good and no one else's. He wanted to win their war for them and then explore the stars to his heart's content on the only place that ever felt like home to him: a starship with a copy of a book on a nightstand and a fortune tucked between its pages. To be able to run forever and never stop.

But he knew just as horribly that there was no turning back from where they were now. Her words were just a story she was telling him, an impossible story.

"Tell me again," he managed. "The cemetery." It was a luxury they did not have time for, but it was just as much a necessity.

* * *

Earth, 2255.

Lorca stopped at the entrance gate to the cemetery and stared out at the many graves. They no longer buried people in these plots laying down. They stood them up to make more space for families to be together. Better still were those who chose to be interred as cremains, because they took up very little real estate indeed.

After a long minute, Lalana finally spoke. "Hayliel?"

"I need a minute." He wasn't entirely sure which was the right row of graves. There seemed to be so many. He leaned against the side of the gate. "Shit. I don't know where they are." The magnitude of this statement hit him. He stared out the graves, helpless and lost. He pressed his hand to his face and felt tears there. He didn't know where his own parents were.

He felt Lalana brush against him, and then her arm on his as she stretched up to the fullest extent of her height, pointing her toes and leaning rather heavily against him for support, because her legs were so thin and spindly and not designed to stand like this. She stretched up so far her face reached his shoulder. Her tail curled around his back. The weight of her pulled him slightly downward, close enough that her voice was in his ear.

"I will carry you if I have to," she whispered, not with the translator, but in the best English she could manage, and after so many years he understood every word of it perfectly. He recognized, too, that these were words he had spoken to her on the Tederek moon.

He wrapped his hand around her, hugging her close, his breaths shuddering through his nose. The cold air ripped at the inside of his nostrils. "Thank you," he said softly.

"Just wait here," she said, and pulled away from him.

He watched as she loped into the cemetery. She did not know or understand not to walk on the graves directly, but she at least did not make the mistake of trying to climb over the stones or jump them, which she could have done quite easily.

It was a strange thing, a cemetery to a lului. That you would not only not eat or recycle your dead but would lock them permanently in the ground, not even having them be food for trees. Eventually, in many centuries, they might be, but not so long as civilization maintained these graves. Perhaps a lului might live long enough to see such civilization fall and trees reclaim what should have been theirs to begin with.

Her head turned left and right as she scanned the gravestones. He could remember the time when she had thought books were a flat and uninteresting pursuit. Now she understood words were how people kept things alive. Important things, like names of loved ones and stories that deserved to be told.

"Here!" she called, and ran back towards him in long, swift strides. She took his hand. "This way."

They moved down the central walkway to the row that held his parents. He barely recognized the headstone. Had it not said "Lorca" at the top he would not have even known it was theirs. After twenty years of only the barest minimum upkeep, it was pockmarked by rain and wind and dark smears of dirt dripped down from the lettering like charcoal tears.

Seeing it made him cry. He wiped his face to no avail. Then he knelt and put his hand on the dirt that hid his mother.

Standing next to him, Lalana gently took her tail and wiped at his tears for him. He wrinkled his nose at the gesture and started to smile slightly through the tears. "I wish you could have met her." His shoulders shook. He inhaled with a gasp. "She would have loved you!" He laughed, sort of. "She would have loved you so much."

"It is enough that she loved you," said Lalana. "Your ears are so pink right now."

He touched his ears. They were icy cold. He smiled through the tears. "Why don't you show me the color?" She obliged and turned a fleshy tone so pink it was verging on true red. He managed a small laugh. "I don't know what I'd do without you," he said.

"You would have an amazing life journeying around the stars," she said, shifting back to blue. "Inspiring the people around you and being a great captain. Exactly what you were doing before I met you."

"Ha!" He managed more of laugh then, happy for the sentiment.

Lalana crouched down over the grave, peering at the ground curiously. "She is your stars I think."

He nodded and inhaled shakily. "Yes," he said. "She's my stars." His fingers pressed against the frozen ground, scraping the frost. Then he sat back and looked at Lalana. "You're my stars, too."

"And you are mine."

He felt, for the first time in nearly forever, at peace.

* * *

Hearing it again, Lorca could only wonder what it was like to have a moment like that, to have a whole life like that. All he had was the story of that day. Next to _Twenty Thousand Leagues_ , it was his favorite.

He was sitting up now, an arm around Lalana, a sad smile on his face, only traces of salt left on his cheeks. "I wish I could go with you."

"You can," she insisted. "I am sure Discovery will come for its captain. I will be standing right beside you when it does."

"My people need me here. I have a responsibility to finish what I started."

"And be their emperor? Gabriel, I did not say this in front of Sarek, but you are not an emperor. You are a captain. You belong on a ship."

"This is a ship."

"This is an abomination of bureaucracy."

Where she had come up with that turn of phrase he did not know, but it was delightful and his face broke into a wide smile.

The smile died almost as quickly as it appeared. "The people here will kill you if they see you," he said. "No matter whose side they're on."

"Human eyes are very poor, especially in this universe. They will not see me."

"I don't know what I'll do if I lose you, too." Maybe he did not love her the way he had Michael, the way the other Lorca loved her, and maybe she did not love him that way either, but she was the closest thing he had left to that.

She turned, pulling away from him so she could look him in the eyes. "Likewise."

They stared at each other, human eyes into lului. Lorca could see his own face reflected back at him with only the faintest of distortions, so subtle was the curve of the discs of her eyes. Looking at him, Lalana saw the stars as always, and also the space between them.

"You are as great a captain as Hayliel was."

His eyebrows lifted in surprise. "You really think that?"

"I know it to be a fact. There is no captain better than Captain Lorca."

He exhaled softly. "I am the best, aren't I?" He had been as great a captain as he could be, honed Discovery into something that could hold its own in a war against a brutal and powerful enemy, and now, like any great captain, he was counting on his crew. Both of his crews. There were two of them, Discovery and the survivors of his coup with Burnham, and he did not want to choose between them.

There had to be a way he could be Captain Lorca to them both.


	88. I Grope About the Embers

A/N: We remain in episode 13, "What's Past Is Prologue."

* * *

"How do I look?" asked Lorca, leaning down to give Lalana a closer look. They stood in the hallway. She inspected his face carefully. Larsson watched them with half his attention, the other half alert for trouble because they were still in territory that could only be described as hostile. This whole universe was hostile.

Lalana half-tapped, half-spun her fingers, as if she was having trouble deciding whether she liked or hated his current appearance. "There is still blood on your face, as you desired. Are you sure I cannot clean it more?"

As it was, she had restricted herself to removing any imminently harmful bacteria that were already threatening infection and reduced any lingering redness around his eyes. To her, the former action was more important. To him, the latter.

Lorca harrumphed smugly and straightened. "Maybe I like it," he said.

Larsson snorted. "It's a good look for you. Evens the playing field for the rest of us."

"Some women like a rougher look," retorted Lorca. "Adds character." He had seen his reflection in Lalana's eyes and found it not entirely unappealing, blood and all. It was easy to feel like an action hero when you looked it.

Larsson rolled his eyes. As if Lorca, of all people, needed more character. Lorca was, in Larsson's estimation, entirely too vain. Larsson was five years younger and turning thoroughly silver—exactly who did Lorca think he was fooling? Himself, Larsson decided, because it surely wasn't anyone over the age of thirty-five. That Larsson could think of at least three women who had recently fallen for it did not help, and he highly suspected the Landry in this universe had been as receptively pliable to her Lorca as the Landry on Discovery because the way the two of them moved in sync as they rolled out on a tactical deployment was entirely too telling.

Lorca was oblivious to Larsson's internal monologue. "You have your orders. Stay out of sight," he told them and headed off down the hall towards Landry and the others. After everything that had happened in the communications station, he felt relieved, more awake, his mind lighter. There was even a spring in his step.

"Well," said Larsson once he and Lalana were alone, "let's go cause some havoc." Lorca had given them a new objective: disable power systems connected to some of the Charon's batteries so Sarek and Voq would have a safe zone upon arrival. Not all the batteries—Lorca might still need them himself—but some.

As they moved through halls mostly emptied of threats thanks to Stamets' biological weapon, Larsson realized Lalana seemed to have a second sense for approaching danger, almost as if she could see around corners. "I can see around corners," she said when he mentioned it. "Not entirely, but enough to know if something is there." Her multitude of pupils gave her a limited ability to differentiate between the reflection of light in the penumbra of a corner, where images of what lay around those corners hid.

"How did any of your people ever get hunted?" asked Larsson. Being on an operation with Lalana was entirely shifting his perceptions of her. None of this had ever come up the many times they had gone swimming or fishing together over the years. He completely understood now why Starfleet Intelligence had recruited her back in 2250.

"Partly luck, partly because if none of us showed up at all, they would burn parts of the forest. A few lului is an acceptable trade to preserve the forest."

Larsson already knew this fact and kicked himself for asking a rhetorical question. Lalana always answered them.

The shipwide comms suddenly activated. It was Lorca. Larsson heard the familiar tone of a speech. Though Larsson had not been aboard the USS Buran at its launch, he had heard about the launch speech from his former crewmates, and they had supplied him with a recording for a laugh.

This speech was very, very different.

"Hello, Philippa. I've watched for years as you let alien races spill over the borders and flourish in our backyard, then have the gall to incite rebellion. The Terrans need a leader who will preserve our way of life, our race. Try as you might, it's clearly not you. Even Michael knew that. It was her great shame. Well, it's indecorous of me to share pillow talk. To the rest, many of you know me, some of you served with me. To all, I make this offer: renounce Georgiou. The Empire is dying in her hands, but you don't have to. Not today. Michael Burnham is not to be touched. She is integral to our future plans. A future where we, together, will make the empire glorious again."

It was more than a speech, it was a directed taunt at Emperor Georgiou.

"What the hell," said Larsson as the audio terminated. "It sounds like he's gone native."

Lalana's tongue clicked. Larsson had no idea how right he was.

They were not the only ones that heard this speech and found a crucial flaw in it. Someone else considered Lorca's words, weighed them against the full breadth of the situation, and initiated a transport.

The light of the transporter was obvious enough even Larsson could see someone had just beamed around the next corner. He and Lalana immediately tucked behind the nearest bulkhead defensively.

Whoever was coming took no steps to disguise their approach. A single set of flat footsteps, no hesitation, an almost casual gait with a faint shuffle to it. The footsteps came closer and closer. Larsson readied his rifle. When the footsteps were almost upon them, he spun out from his hiding place with weapon drawn.

It was Petrellovitz. She stopped when Larsson jumped out but seemed unsurprised by his emergence. She was holding Groves' pineapple in her hands. It was a relief to see a familiar face, even when it was unfamiliar, because at least she was not one of the emperor's people.

"You disappeared," said Larsson accusingly. "Captain was displeased. You went to get that?" He jerked his rifle at the pineapple.

Petrellovitz did not answer his question. Instead, she went, "Lieutenant Larsson. I need you to take me to your ship." She turned her head, looking for telltale signs of visual anomaly along the niche where Larsson had been standing. "Where's that thing?"

"What thing?" said Larsson.

Petrellovitz glared fiercely. She had no time for games. "The thing that's with you. The... alien."

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"I am quite certain Emellia means me, Einar." Lalana dropped down from the ceiling, startling Petrellovitz. She was wearing a pattern of colors replicating the texture of the ceiling panels. Despite this camouflage, in such a low-ceilinged corridor with almost-adequate lighting, the thing that had made her hard to spot had not been the color and texture of her filaments but her location. Most humanoids rarely looked up unless there was something abundantly obvious above them.

Petrellovitz recovered her composure quickly. "You're coming with us."

Lalana tilted her head to the left, wondering about the state of this universe's version of Mischkelovitz—her matted, stringy hair, her multitude of scars. "Did Gabriel send you?"

It took Petrellovitz a moment too long to answer. "Yes."

The lie was obvious. Lalana pressed her fingers together and said, "We are already on a mission. You are welcome to join us, but we must adhere to Gabriel's plan."

"New mission, take me to your ship," said Petrellovitz with a petulance in her tone and posture that was entirely like Mischkelovitz.

Petrellovitz had no weapon, only the pineapple. "Come, Einar, let us continue," said Lalana, and they turned to do so.

"Wait!" went Petrellovitz. She held out the pineapple. "Can you hold this?"

"My hands are full," said Larsson, indicating his rifle.

"My arms hurt," said Petrellovitz, almost breathlessly. There was something distant in her intonation. "They hurt so much. Everything hurts." Her eyes seemed to be fixed on Larsson without seeing him.

Larsson and Lalana exchanged a glance.

Petrellovitz's gaze shifted to Lalana as she realized, unbelievably, that Larsson took direction from an _alien_. "I'll go with you. I can handle a weapon. Let me carry the rifle," she said forcefully.

Larsson only shook his head. "No way."

"I will carry the pineapple," offered Lalana, stretching her arms out. This seemed to suit Petrellovitz. She handed the misshapen blob of components over, careful to position it so the parts that stuck out were not under any stress that might bend or break them.

Hands freed from their burden, Petrellovitz rolled up one of her sleeves and ran her fingers across the wounds on her forearm. The pineapple really had been painful to carry around. Larsson repressed a shudder at the sight. He suspected this universe's O'Malley was the source of those marks. Petrellovitz shuffled half a step back from Lalana, seemingly engrossed in the mess of bloodied, torn flesh.

What happened next happened very quickly. Petrellovitz appeared to be rolling her sleeve further up or trying to scratch an itch above her elbow. Her fingers closed around something hidden in the upper part of her sleeve the size of a pen cap. She pulled it out and simultaneously lunged towards Larsson, stabbing it through the fabric of Larsson's sleeve. Larsson gave a surprised "Gah!" at the sharp and sudden pain as Petrellovitz launched herself backwards, intentionally sprawling onto the floor with the intent of rolling or springing away, but Lalana's tail whipped around and hooked Petrellovitz's ankle, making escape impossible.

A lancet hung from Larsson's arm. He pointed his rifle down at Petrellovitz and lifted his arm to inspect the lancet. There was something resembling an insect wing attached to the back of it—a membranous ampule attachment which had collapsed into a vacuum as it emptied during injection.

"Explain yourself or I will crush your ankle and remove your foot," said Lalana sharply, her tail tightening and her filaments wriggling into Petrellovitz's skin.

Though Petrellovitz had been intending to dash to a safe distance to deliver this information, the fact that Larsson and Lalana were not killing her outright rendered this action unnecessary. She smiled unpleasantly up at them from the floor. "It's a biological agent. If you don't get the antidote, you'll be dead. I'll make the antidote on your ship. The one with the spore displacement drive. You have... two hours. I hope your ship is nearby."

Larsson pulled the lancet/ampule combo out of his arm and held it between two fingers. To him it seemed like an overly large mosquito.

"Let me see," said Lalana, releasing Petrellovitz's leg so she could pluck the offending object from Larssons fingers with some of the filaments of her tail. Her filaments circled around the collapsed ampule and snaked towards the injection point. She trilled in alarm and the lancet fell to the ground, a few epithelial filaments still attached and fading from blue-grey to brown. "What is that!" went Lalana, head turning between the lancet and Petrellovitz.

"What?" said Larsson, alarmed.

"It was so toxic, my cells immediately sealed and detached themselves to protect the main matrix from contamination."

Larsson hastily pulled up his sleeve, never mind that this meant taking his gun off Petrellovitz. There was an ugly patch of browning skin the size of a penny.

"I suggest we get a move on," said Petrellovitz, standing and rolling her sleeve down. "The sooner you get me to your ship, the less permanent damage."

"We should contact Gabriel," said Lalana, but they could not access the communications system. Even Larsson's communicator was not working. Larsson noticed the control indicator on the pineapple was red instead of green. He attempted to reactivate it. Nothing happened.

"You're wasting time," said Petrellovitz. "I've biolocked the pineapple to my signature and commands. So long as you are within range of it, all systems will react only to me. You can leave me and the pineapple and reach Gabriel, but how long will it take you? And I'll disappear and you'll never have your antidote."

Larsson pointed his rifle at the pineapple. "Then no more pineapple," he said.

Petrellovitz stepped between Larsson and Lalana. "No," she said. "That won't undo the lock. It will just remove the key. You'll seal the systems permanently." She slid back half a step, turning to address Lalana and Larsson both. "Listen up. I know you have great scientists in your universe, the same as we do. I'm like Einstein, Hawking, and Curie combined. You think you can outsmart me? You can't. But if you take me to your ship right now, and if we reach it in time, then Lieutenant Larsson can live."

There were a few details to this comparison which were lost on Larsson and Lalana. Curie, for example, was renowned in this universe for tricking people into being her research subjects as she unraveled the mysteries of radiation. Hawking, though physically debilitated, had provided the foundational work for many of the Empire's most devastating weapons, planet-busters particularly. Einstein's scientific crimes were too numerous to list and dwarfed only by the magnitude of his scientific achievements. The three of them were Petrellovitz's personal idols.

"Take Einar to the ship then," said Lalana. "I will complete Gabriel's objective on my own."

"No," said Petrellovitz. "Either you come with me or he dies. I'm not here for Einar." If she could have, she would have injected Lalana with the toxin directly. The only reason she chose Larsson was that she had no idea how the chemical agent would interact with Lalana's biology or even if it would have had any effect. Her attempts to remote scan Lalana had resulted in null data.

Larsson pressed his hand against the mark on his arm. It ached faintly, but he felt otherwise fine. "Never mind this. Let's get those power relays. Captain's counting on us."

"You must go to Discovery and get help," insisted Lalana.

"You're not listening," said Petrellovitz. "They'll never synthesize the antidote in time. You need me, and again, my help is conditional."

Lalana's hands twitched. She was still holding the pineapple. Her fingers stretched towards one another, only the fingertips able to touch across the circumference of the pineapple, tapping lightly but rapidly.

At her distress, Larsson smiled thinly. "It's fine. I'm not as old as you, but I had a good run. I don't care if I die."

Lalana's fur began to writhe. Her pupils were widening and she was beginning to shake. She felt like balling up onto the floor. "Einar! You're my best friend! And there is no other copy of your face for me to find!" The other him was already dead.

Larsson's face twisted with helplessness. "But we came here for you. I can't let you give up on this for me."

Watching them, Petrellovitz felt revulsion. The Larsson she had known would never have had an alien as a best friend. He loved killing and cooking them. The whole premise of the other universe was abhorrent to her. Its denizens were just as abhorrent, human and alien both, with their endless declarations of goodwill and friendship and _love_ as if any of these were real things you could experience with anyone, human or alien.

Lalana twisted towards Petrellovitz, stilling the tapping of her fingertips by pressing them tightly together. "I will go with you, Emellia. But you must tell Gabriel we are unable to complete our objective."

Petrellovitz smiled, this time with sinister delight. "You have a deal. But please, call me Petra. And I'll take that pineapple back now." Maybe it did hurt to carry it in her torn-up arms, but Emellia Petrellovitz was no stranger to pain.

* * *

Lorca was leading his forces towards a fight against an approaching group of Imperial soldiers when the comms beeped. Targeted systems were supposed to be disrupted right now to prevent Georgiou from finding them and launching any remote countermeasures, but when Lorca realized who it was, it made perfect sense.

"Petra," he spat. "You ran off. Didn't take you for a coward. Michael'd be disappointed."

"Are you alone, Gabriel?" she intoned lowly in reply.

Lorca glanced at Landry and Stamets. "No time for your games. Now get down here and make yourself useful."

Petrellovitz's voice immediately triggered Stamets' ire. "Captain!" he practically squeaked. "As I have told you time and time again, there is absolutely nothing Lieutenant Commander Petrellovitz can do that I can't—"

"Shut up, Stamets!" said both Lorca and Petrellovitz.

"Eggheads," said Landry disapprovingly.

Petrellovitz followed this up with, "Captain, I met a friend of yours who regrets to inform you that the power relays for the starboard batteries aren't going to be disabled."

Lorca froze and looked at Landry. He signaled for her to lead everyone ahead. As his people moved past him, the _tromp-tromp-tromp_ of their footsteps echoing down the hall, Lorca said, "Petra, if you've done anything to Larsson and—" He couldn't say Lalana's name in front of the soldiers streaming past him. Even if the name meant nothing to them, it was clearly not human. Suddenly the solution struck him. "—Eleanor, there's no rock, no stone will hide you. You understand me?"

The footsteps echoed away down the hall.

"I'm not hiding from you. I heard your speech. It was a good speech, but it did confirm something I've always suspected. You're different. You always have been, but since returning from the other world, I can see it more clearly. I know your secret, Gabriel."

The frowning grimace on Lorca's face was both true and a cover for the gnawing worry in his stomach. This was exactly the reason he had wanted Lalana off the Charon in the first place. "Petra. Where's Lalana?"

"Your pet is safe. I won't harm it. It's proof, after all, that you aren't who you claim to be. I've always known. Ever since that night. You're the one Michael would be disappointed in. So I'm keeping your pet as insurance."

Lorca inhaled deeply. "Lalana is no one's pet," he growled, each word sharply hissing through clenched teeth.

"So then, she's a useful toy? Would you believe she's also _expendable?_ There's a recording of you in a room talking with some rebels. Makes for very interesting viewing."

It was Cornwell all over again. He was naked and exposed and being stabbed by something too close to his heart. He stared in shock at the emptiness around him, his hands tightening on his phaser rifle.

"The thing is, I really like your plan. You helped set the rebels up, didn't you? To destabilize Georgiou. You really are something else. So, I've decided to delete the recording from the Charon and let you finish what you started. Georgiou is a failure who needs to be removed. When you've taken care of her, then we'll talk about your pet. I think it's time the Empire had some _intelligent_ leadership."

Lorca's shock faded into a determined glower. "You think you can make a power play against me? No one's gonna follow you."

"I know that. That's why you can trust me. I need you. I'm not your enemy, Gabriel. I want to stand with you and the other Michael. That will ensure someone still has the Empire's best interests at heart." Petrellovitz did not believe in love, or friendship, or anything based on feelings. The one thing she did believe in was shared goals. "I'm even doing exactly what you asked and taking your pet back to Discovery. Besides, you don't need me here, you have Stamets, like you wanted."

Lorca snorted at that. "I didn't want Stamets. If you hadn't run off..." It was no secret what Lorca did to traitors, and Stamets had betrayed them all. "Come back, stand with me. We'll do this together. It's what Michael would have wanted."

"I agree, but there's something I need to take care of first. Don't worry, I'll find you when I'm done. Now that we've conquered space, I think we ought to conquer time, don't you?"

* * *

The firefight was already in progress when Lorca caught up to Landry and the others. He dropped into the fray as seamlessly as if he had been there from the outset. Since they were using his tactical plan, in a way, he had been.

"Surrender and you don't have to die!" he bellowed over the bursts of phaser fire, the roars of retribution on both sides, and the occasional final screams of life. His forces were making mincemeat of the guards. It was like shooting fish in a barrel. Intentionally so; Lorca's people were fighting on a battlefield he had chosen for this precise reason. Victory was assured as a result.

The Imperial soldiers were dwindling down to a surviving handful. "We surrender!" came the call, and all the soldiers who remained standing threw down their weapons and stood with their hands in the air.

Lorca strode towards them, smirking, Landry at his side. "That's more like it. You must be pretty loyal to your emperor to charge into battle for her this late in the game. Loyalty's important. Good for you. Not so good for me, though, is it? I did say if you surrendered you'd live. Mind you, I didn't say how long, and unfortunately, we just don't have the logistical wherewithal for any prisoners right now."

Lorca raised his rifle. Landry and the others did the same. With a burst of phaser fire, the surrendering forces evaporated into licks of fire in the air save for one: their commander, Joann Owosekun. Lorca pointed his rifle at her. Owosekun's eyes were wide with shock and fear.

"Hope you're still loyal," he said. "I need you to deliver a message."

Landry started laughing, her shoulders shaking with mirth. How much she had missed Lorca's sense of humor. Lorca smirked at her. It was beginning to feel like old times.

The laughter subsided. "That thing Petra mentioned with the power relays, is that a problem? I can send a team."

Lorca shook his head. "No." The loss of that objective was a minor setback if even that. In truth, once they had the throne room, it likely wouldn't make a lick of difference. Mostly the point had been busywork to keep Lalana and Larsson out of the way. In the end, the task seemed to have done just that.

* * *

All of Larsson's arm was brown now. The color had spread across his shoulders and onto his neck like the roots and branches of a tree. His head was swimming as he sat at the shuttle controls. "We're coming—we're coming up on—nngh." He rubbed at his face. The shuttle was cold, but he was sweating. He had removed the armor and tunic of his Terran uniform and was in his undershirt.

Lalana wiped the sweat from his brow with her tail. "I'm so sorry, Einar."

"It's all right," he assured her. "I saw Matty, you know. Matty Kerrigan, from... from the Triton."

"I know," she said. He had told her this half a dozen times now in his delirium.

The worst part was, there was nothing Lalana could do about the toxin. Her attempts to negate it had been ineffective. Her cells shut down and detached upon contact. She was therefore protected from the contagion, but not in any way that could help Larsson.

Larsson's hands jerked on the controls, threatening to undo their course. His head shook in an attempt to clear the confusion in his mind to no avail.

"Let me pilot for a bit, Einar," said Lalana, nudging his hands aside with her tail. "We're almost there."

Petrellovitz watched Lalana and Larsson, still disgusted by the display of familiarity. Some aliens she could almost understand the attraction of. Risians, for example, were visually identical to humans, to the point where a few of them sometimes infiltrated the Terrans' ranks or lived as Terrans entirely. Vulcans had strange, pointed eyebrows and ears, but again, otherwise almost human in appearance, though their personalities always gave them away. Not so Lalana. The lului was grossly inhuman and looked like nothing so much as a giant blue kangaroo rat.

Besides, thought Petrellovitz, if Larsson was deteriorating beyond the point of recovery, well, that was Lalana's fault because she was the reason they could not use the transporters to get to the shuttle in the first place.

Another thing disgusted Petrellovitz. She was still holding the pineapple. While there was no denying it was entirely effective, it looked like it had been crafted by a five-year-old child. Not a QORYA child, the regular kind of whelp normal people raised. Lorca thought the person who made this could replace her? That was an insult too far.

She would settle this insult and the question of her expendability once and for all. There could only be one of her.

* * *

They were hidden along the back of a long, tall hallway awaiting Georgiou. Tendrils of light snaked up the walls without ever seeming to fully illuminate its vaulted length. This would have been an ideal deployment for Lalana. She could have hidden in the shadows at its peak, dropped down onto Georgiou from above, wrapped her tail around Georgiou's neck, fused herself to Georgiou's shoulders, and neutralized the emperor.

There was a flutter in the golden light at the other end of the hall. Footsteps marching towards them. Lorca had one hand on Owosekun's shoulder. He squeezed her shoulder and said, "Now be a good little birdie and fly on over." He shoved her forward.

A single figure emerged, silhouetted and alone. Georgiou, standing as tantalizing bait, seemingly exposed, which meant she wasn't. Moments later, a cadre of soldiers filtered in behind her and took up offensive positions.

"Don't shoot," said Owosekun, emerging from the shadows and approaching Georgiou with her hands in the air.

Georgiou looked at Owosekun, disappointed. She had thought perhaps Owosekun might take Michael's place in some capacity, but it seemed not. "Where are your troops, commander?"

"We were ambushed."

"How did you survive?"

It was not an easy admission for Owosekun. "Lorca spared me. He said he wanted you to know..."

"Know what?"

"That he was here."

One, clean shot from Landry reduced Owosekun to flickers of fire in the air. The red dots of charged weapons lit the dark end of the hallway, bobbing faintly like dancing fireflies.

Lorca stepped out from behind a column in front of his men. Georgiou had come exactly as he intended. She was on his battlefield now. He grinned. "Hello, Pippa. Did you miss me?"

Lorca's troops fired, their shots hitting the defensive shield Georgiou had erected in the hallway. In response, Georgiou triggered a command from an interface on her wrist and automated turrets popped out from the walls and rained fire back down towards Lorca's troops. Lorca easily ducked back behind the column. The front line of his forces took the brunt of the attack.

Landry was standing behind the column directly across from Lorca. He signaled her. One finger, one second. They both moved out at the same time and struck the pair of turrets, disabling them at once.

It was unfortunate, the bodies of the dead on the floor between them, but they had gone to their deaths willingly to expose the turrets and allow a path to be cleared for the others.

"Light her up," ordered Lorca. The remaining bulk of his forces fired at the shield between them and the emperor. "Mr. Stamets!"

"Containment field at 30%, 25%."

The shield was dropping. Georgiou raised a fist and withdrew back towards cover with her guards.

"Five, four, three, two, it's down!" shouted Stamets.

The firefight erupted from both sides. Lorca crouched down and rolled something down the hallway. A small, silver ball.

"Flash grenade!" shouted Georgiou, but not quickly enough. A brilliant white light filled the corridor. Georgiou and some of her guards managed to shield their eyes, but many were left screaming and blinded in the grenade's wake. Their screams were quickly silenced into wisps of fiery disintegration.

With her guards falling around her, Georgiou stepped out, fired a few shots, and called out, "Emergency transport!"

She was gone. Lorca strode forward into the golden light where Georgiou had been. His quarry had escaped. He turned to Stamets. "You didn't warn me she could do that, Mr. Stamets." Petrellovitz would have figured that out. Damn her for her absence.

"Please tell me we can kill him now," said Landry.

"Well that depends if he can disable an emergency transport system."

"I can," said Stamets, working on the padd in his hands. "I can do that."

"Good," said Lorca. Landry sighed in disappointment.

At least they had advanced their position. "Set up a perimeter around the throne room. Let's tighten the noose."


	89. The Man Who Sold the World

A/N: Continues episode 13, "What's Past Is Prologue."

Hello and welcome to an in-depth look at what characters know and how they know it and whether or not we ought to question them. The short answer is, even if you ignore the layer I added with the rebel allies angle, most of these points remain valid. (Also, you should question everyone. Everyone has their own motives and perspective, especially in this version of the story.)

I think the show failed the crucial "show, don't tell" test here. Burnham and other characters told us things without showing any evidence and lot of it did not seem well-thought-out. (A double shame when this is supposed to be trademark of Burnham and also Lorca.) I'd even argue the show contained information explicitly counter to Burnham's conclusions, some of which I am presenting here.

While I appreciate why Burnham came to these conclusions (the same reason Lorca trusted her: illogical affection for a dead person's face—the Vulcan Science Academy would be so disappointed in their number one student) the fact is, she ate up everything Georgiou served her (even _Kelpien_ ) and I think the show writers did everyone a disservice, Burnham in particular, because no one stopped to think about any of it.

What if they had?

* * *

"Burnham to Discovery, do you copy? Come in."

Burnham was crouched in one of the thousands of access shafts aboard the Charon, tapping into the computer systems in a frantic bid to initiate communications. Twice now she had been forced to change positions and start over. Discovery had to be getting close now. She had to reach them before it was too late. She listened to the sounds of static and shifted the transmission band to compensate for the interference.

"Discovery, do you copy? Come in." Static. "Please come in."

Saru's image appeared on the tiny monitor. "Discovery here. We are receiving you."

They were mutually relieved to be in contact again, but as Saru searched the backdrop of Burnham's transmission, he saw not the Imperial throne room from their last communication, but a small, cramped space readily identifiable as a maintenance shaft. "It appears your situation has become dire. Is the captain with you?"

"He's one of them, he's Terran," said Burnham quickly. "He used us and the Discovery to jump here, to his own universe. It was his plan all along."

"That's impossible," said Saru. "Surely we would have sensed something. I would have." He threw a hand up towards his threat ganglia. Nothing in his instincts had ever revealed Lorca to be a credible threat or possess any ill will towards him or the rest of the crew.

Stamets was standing beside Saru. Burnham's communication had arrived during a discussion about the mycelial super-reactor on the Charon and its threat to all existence. Something clicked in Stamets' mind. "That's why we didn't end up at Starbase 46," he realized. "Lorca altered the coordinates of my last jump."

Over at the tactical console with the schematics of the Charon in front of her, Tilly asked, "How?"

"He got the data he needed from those jumps I did around the Klingon ship. Then all that was left was to access navigation control and he can do that from his chair." Stamets turned and looked at the captain's chair, which presently contained Saru. The solution had been right in front of them the whole time.

Immense relief washed over Tilly. She had not caused this. Stamets had not caused this. Then her stomach twisted into a knot as she realized the truth of it. The captain had caused it. The captain they trusted had done this to Stamets and to all of them. What little color existed in her face drained away.

"Lorca's staging a coup against the emperor," said Burnham. "You have to abort coming to the palace ship. Get as far away as you can."

"I will not consider leaving you behind," said Saru sharply.

"Saru, he has no need for our crew. He will kill all of you. He might take Discovery back to our universe and bring the whole Terran fleet with him."

"Not if the Terrans have wiped out all life already," noted Stamets. He explained the effects of the Charon's super-mycelial reactor to Burnham, concluding, "It's destroying the network. When it goes, it takes all life with it, in all universes."

Burnham took a breath, filling with determination. "How do we stop it?" she asked.

That was the very issue they had been concerning themselves with solving during Burnham's time on the run and they had come up with a rather drastic solution: a direct torpedo hit on the reactor would sever its connection to the network, removing the source of the network's decay. In time, the network would recover.

There was one problem.

"There's a containment field protecting the orb," said Tilly. "Our weapons can't penetrate it." The problem reminded Tilly of Milosz Mischkelovitz's interphasic torpedo countermeasures from the Memory Alpha recording, but it turned out interphasic torpedoes had already been attempted in this universe and effective countermeasures developed and implemented into the Charon's shield systems. One terrifying result of a universe consumed with such hatred and fear was that the weapons and defenses here were somewhat more advanced—at the expense of developments in other areas, such as medical technology, where Terran science fell far short.

"Leave the containment field to me," said Burnham. "Stay at warp so you can't be boarded and I'll find a way to signal you when I'm in place. Be ready to blow up the reactor when I do. Burnham out."

As they all contemplated the ramifications of this course of action, Bryce reported from the comms station, "Captain, we're receiving another transmission. It's our shuttle."

"Let's hear it," said Saru.

If there was any question as to how Bryce knew it was their shuttle, it was immediately answered. "Discovery? Discovery! This is your shuttlecraft!"

This was not the way a shuttlecraft was supposed to address a starship. It was also recognizably Lalana's voice.

"Audio only," said Saru. "Shuttlecraft, this is Discovery. What is your status?"

"Einar is hurt, and Emellia—"

Suddenly a picture appeared. Everyone on the bridge was startled to see Lalana, even Saru and Tilly. Larsson was half-conscious in the copilot seat beside her. Stamets was the most stunned by far. He recognized Lalana from the mycelial demonstration all those many months ago and realized she must have been aboard Discovery the whole time, insane as that seemed.

"Mr. Bryce!" said Saru sharply.

"Something overrode the signal!" Bryce reported, trying to determine the source of the issue despite the freakishly unsettling distraction of Lalana's appearance and the fact he, like everyone else, was still reeling from the bomb Burnham had dropped on them minutes ago concerning the true identity of their captain.

A figure stepped forward from the rear of the craft. Saru was startled to see a heavily-scarred version of Mischkelovitz. "It's _Petra_ ," she corrected, smiling in a way that unnerved everyone watching the transmission. Then she decided to try out something new. "Captain Petrellovitz." She found the words very satisfying indeed. The lights on the pineapple cradled in her arm flashed. Saru's ganglia made an appearance and for once he did not feel embarrassed about it because they seemed entirely appropriate.

Larsson twisted in his seat, brow furrowing. He was very confused right now but he had just realized something. They used the pineapple to get off Discovery with full systems authorization. The pineapple had then given them access to the Charon despite Terran security countermeasures. The pineapple was now firmly under Petrellovitz's control. That could only mean one thing.

Larsson lurched out of his chair and threw himself at Petrellovitz, knocking both her and the pineapple to the floor. The pineapple bounced and cracked. Larsson and Petrellovitz both scrambled after it. Larsson shoved Petrellovitz roughly aside and managing to grab hold of it first. He staggered to his feet and slammed the pineapple against the wall of the shuttle, snapping the protruding antenna, and slammed it again, smashing components against one another. Bits and pieces fell to the floor. Petrellovitz leapt up and grabbed hold of his arm in an attempt to prevent him from doing any more damage. He shook her off with a bellow and threw the pineapple against the far wall of the shuttle. The main body of the pineapple broke into three. Satisfied, Larsson collapsed onto the floor.

All this with Lalana and the bridge crew watching. Petrellovitz scurried after the pineapple's remnants and tried to see if any of the component modules were still working. The power unit had been completely smashed. It was repairable, but she would need a workshop and replacement parts to fix it. She dropped the pieces she was holding. Maybe if she connected the other modules to a different power source on the shuttle...

"I am sending our coordinates and initiating a remote docking override," said Lalana calmly. "Please have a security team and a medical team meet us." She terminated the transmission with her tail and hopped down from the pilot's seat.

Larsson was breathing heavily, phlegmy spittle dripping onto the floor.

"I'll never give you the antidote now," hissed Petrellovitz, trying to piece the pineapple back together before the Discovery arrived.

"Einar, why?" said Lalana.

"She would have taken the ship," he gasped. "I have to save the ship. I can't let Discovery... end up like..." His eyes closed. Lalana brushed her tail across Larsson's forehead.

"I do not know why they never promoted you. You are one of the finest officers I know."

Hearing this confused Larsson. In his present state of mind, he _had_ been promoted. He was a lieutenant commander on the Buran, in charge of the armory, or maybe the second shift security chief, and Gabriel Lorca was in command.

* * *

"Chaos" was the word that best described the shuttle's return. Petrellovitz was dragged kicking and screaming to the brig while Larsson was rushed to sickbay. Lalana then attempted to board the shuttle again.

"Where do you think you are going?" asked Saru.

"I must return to the Charon."

"We are presently headed there ourselves."

"Excellent!" said Lalana, hopping down from the shuttle. "Which way is the medical bay?" For all the time she had been aboard, she still had no clue as to the ship's general layout.

Saru looked at Lalana, considering what to do. She was closer to Lorca than almost anyone and if rumor was to be believed, had even been in a relationship with the original Lorca, though the details of that were hard to fathom. Saru was not entirely sure how to break the news to her that the captain had betrayed them all. He decided for the moment to focus on a second pressing issue.

"It has not escaped my notice that you and Lieutenant Larsson stole this shuttle. As much as it pains me, it would be more appropriate for you to go to the brig."

"We did not steal the shuttle," said Lalana. "We were following the captain's orders. As this is his ship, what we did was not theft."

"Lorca is not who he seems," said Saru.

If Lalana registered this information, she made no sign of it. "Einar is dying. Petra was supposed to synthesize an antidote, but I do not think she will do this now that we have prevented her from seizing control of Discovery. Einar is my best friend, Saru. I wish to remain with him until we reach the Charon."

Saru decided the fact Lalana thought she was following Lorca's orders made the shuttle incident something of a forgivable offense. She was only guilty of the same mistake as the rest of them. "I will take you to the medbay."

It was the first time Saru had ever walked alongside Lalana. He discovered her legs were readily capable of mirroring his natural stride. There was no need for him to shorten his steps the way he did with humans. There was something satisfying in it: two aliens gliding down the corridors with long, loping gaits. They attracted stares, of course; Lalana more than Saru.

"It has never bothered me before, going the long way," said Lalana. Her fingers tapped together as she moved. "Lului are very tolerant of long lengths of time. Yet as I have lived among humans for what they call a decade, I find myself wishing I could take advantage of the same shortcuts everyone else does. It turns out there is so little time. Human lives are but ephemera and I am an unchanging mountain past which the clouds of their existence drift by. I did not realize, having lived as a mountain, that I would come to care so much for the droplets of their rain. Yet I do. I find the water is more important than the trees. If only I could stop it slipping through my fingers, but that is the nature of water. It cuts deeply through the mountain over time, all the little furrows, and leaves a mark that lasts forever, yet still it slips by."

The words shook Saru deeply. They were beautiful and sad. Whatever opportunity Saru might have taken to broach the subject of Lorca was swept away by Lalana's rumination as readily as the water in her metaphor.

They arrived at the medical bay. Larsson was on a biobed, being attended to by a doctor named Pollard and two nurses. They were having trouble figuring out a method of dealing with the unknown toxin. Pollard was calling for scans and equally soliciting ideas from her staff.

"Maybe if we excise the contaminated tissue?" suggested one nurse.

"It's too widespread," said the other. "It's circulated through all his systems." The visible contamination on Larsson's skin was only the surface of the issue in a very literal sense. His bloodstream had done most of the work spreading the damage throughout his body.

"Can we neutralize it?" Pollard wondered aloud. "Let's try slowing the spread and buying more time. Have you determined the mechanism yet?"

"It seems be a biogenic..."

Lalana's fur writhed faintly and she locked her fingers together to cease their knocking. "Perhaps Petra can be convinced to help? Please will you try?"

"Of course," promised Saru. Partly because meant not having to tell Lalana about Lorca just yet.

* * *

"It's too late," said Petrellovitz, looking at Saru through the blue glimmer of the brig forcefield with her trademark dead stare. Her voice was tonelessly neutral.

Not so long ago, Saru had been standing in almost this same position appealing to the prisoner in the opposite cell for a very similar reason. That time, he had succeeded in convincing L'Rell to save the life of the man who still called himself Ash Tyler even if some intrinsic part of him was Voq.

Saru was quickly losing hope that his conversation with Petrellovitz would turn out the same.

The difference was, L'Rell cared about Voq. Petrellovitz had no such concern for Larsson. Saru's only hope lay in appealing to broader ideals. One thing Petrellovitz made clear at the outset of the conversation was that she fully understood what Discovery was and where it had come from and she hated it. About the only ideal the people in this universe seemed to hold was that humans were somehow superior to all other species. Saru attempted to use it. "A man's life is on the line. No matter what the differences between our people, I cannot imagine you place so little value on a _human_ life."

Petrellovitz's ire was roused. Derision entered her voice. "That's where you're wrong. All life is an accident. Mine, yours, every species there is, an aberration of existence. It's random, an enduring and pointless futility."

"Then why do anything?" challenged Saru.

Petrellovitz smiled and again Saru's ganglia emerged. "Because," was all she said.

Saru steeled himself, his ganglia retracting. "If you would be willing to assist with Lieutenant Larsson's condition, we would be willing to offer some form of deal."

"Oh? What do you have in mind?"

"We could return you to your people."

"My people? _My people?_ " Petrellovitz began to laugh hysterically. "I'm the only one of my kind! I have no people!" She laughed and laughed and Saru realized there was little chance she would give them anything.

Petrellovitz's laughter continued for some time after Saru's departure. It ceased only when Petrellovitz noticed the Klingon prisoner in the cell opposite was staring at her. Petrellovitz smirked at the Klingon and turned her attention to the brig's internal control panel.

She saw the controls for the toilet, the cot, the food dispenser, and beneath them something else labeled BRIG CHESS. Petrellovitz stared at it. A small smile curled onto her lips. It seemed someone had saved her the trouble of having to program a backdoor herself.

As she keyed in a username for herself, "PETR," Petrellovitz frowned. This program had to be what she thought it was, yet it was not the way she would have built it. A system that could only handle a four-letter username and a largely black screen with green text and graphics that were so basic they could have been rendered on an oscilloscope. It gave the program a wholly primitive feeling.

Honestly, this was almost as bad as the pineapple.

* * *

On the bridge, Lieutenant Commander Airiam was sitting in the captain's chair when she received an alert in the back of her mind. Literally. She was a cyborg. Her body was a marvel of biology and technology in combination that gave her a connection to the ship in a very real sense.

As impressive as this was, she was not a fully-integrated part of the ship's systems. Ignoring for a moment the fact the technology in her was entirely different to a starship's computer, it was safer for both her and the ship if the two of them operated as independent entities. The extent of her connection were a few small rudimentary alerts.

Right now, her cyborg status was little more than a frivolous distraction because the alert pinging in her head concerned her primary recreational activity, brig chess. Groves called it the "fresh meat signal." Any time a new opponent registered, Airiam received a small alert, as did Groves and anyone else who opted in to it. (The Terran Empire's hatred of nonhumans had put Airiam on restricted bridge duty for almost a week now, affording her ample opportunity to climb in the game's ranks, and she was currently second on the scoreboard.)

Airiam resisted the mild inclination to open brig chess and examine this new opponent. She stringently avoided playing chess while on the bridge. She had been third in command on the day shift prior to the reveal of Lorca's deception and now she was second, which made her in a sense acting first officer. She took this responsibility seriously and endeavored to set a good example with her work ethic. She dismissed the alert and resumed her monitoring of the nearly stars for any signs of trouble, never once suspecting that trouble was already upon them.

* * *

Saru expected to find Larsson and Lalana still in the medical bay but both were gone. "We told him to stay, but he said he wasn't dying in here if there was nothing we could do," explained Pollard of Larsson's absence. "We were able to treat him for the side effects. We reduced the fever and swelling."

"Is there truly nothing more you can do, doctor?" asked Saru.

"We have tissue samples and we'll keep working, but..." Pollard did not sound optimistic at all. "Our best option is cryogenic and he declined."

Saru was quickly realizing part of the reason Larsson had never been promoted above lieutenant was that he was extremely stubborn. A human would have likened this quality to an ox—doubly appropriate given that an ox was roughly how big Larsson was.

Saru found his pair of shuttle thieves in Lab 26 along with Mischkelovitz, O'Malley, and Groves. It was patently a good idea on Lalana's part. Sickbay, being the default destination for emergency transports, was the most dangerous place on the ship for her short of standing directly on a transporter pad.

Miraculously, Larsson was upright. The brown was now covering half his face but he seemed entirely lucid. His fever was completely under control. Mischkelovitz was hovering around him, attempting to work out a treatment protocol of her own for his condition. Saru found some hope in that. Since her other self was ostensibly the one who developed this toxin, Mischkelovitz might hold the best hope of solving the problem.

There was something else going on in the lab, too. Lalana was relating her account of her adventure aboard the Charon. She was not very far into the story.

"He was screaming," she said. "On and on. It appeared to be very painful."

"Yeah, they tried to put me in one of those," Larsson chimed in. "Captain came and stopped them."

This seemed like as good a moment as any. "If I may have your attention," said Saru. He received it from everyone but Mischkelovitz, who was too busy humming and talking to herself as she worked on the problem of Larsson's condition to take much note of anything or anyone else. "I regret to inform you we have been misled. The Lorca we thought to be our captain is not from our universe. He is from this one, and our coming here was no accident. He manipulated the Discovery to bring us to this world for the purposes of staging a coup."

This declaration was met with stares, blank and enduring. Groves was first to process it. He squinted, winced a moment, and subsequently shrugged. Larsson merely scratched his head. It was entirely possible, despite his lucidity, that he was not functioning at full capacity.

O'Malley looked completely and utterly lost. "What?"

This prompted a scathing denigration from Groves. "Let me put this in terms even you can understand. Our Captain Lorca is actually the captain from this universe. We've been following a false Messiah. Sorry if that's a disappointment." He gesticulated nonchalantly as he spoke, as if his casually dismissive tone weren't insult enough.

Mischkelovitz finally detected something was wrong in the atmosphere of the room and touched a finger to her ears, turning back on her external audio. She also brought up the computer audio transcript and skimmed it, a trick she had learned from Lorca. Her eyes went wide and her hand pressed against her lips. The mycelial map, the rank insignia from another universe. It all made perfect sense now.

"For how long?" asked Groves.

"I do not know," said Saru.

"Since the Buran," offered Lalana.

All eyes turned to her. She tilted her head at them as if their confusion was the part of this that made no sense.

"Are you certain?" asked Saru, folding his fingers together, wondering if he had heard correctly.

"Of course. I am surprised that none of you ever figured it out. It was obvious, wasn't it? Did you not see his face? He has the worst poker face of any human I have ever met. But, what does it matter?"

Now Saru was certain he had misheard. "The captain is an imposter."

"The captain is the captain," said Lalana. "It does not matter what universe he is from."

"Ah, no," went Groves. "Everyone in this universe is basically _the worst_ so it matters a lot."

Lalana drew herself up, gripping the edge of the table. She subtly shifted her tone to a color that was a shade brighter and more vibrant than her usual blue as a sort of visual reinforcement of her confidence.

"Simply because he is not from the same world as us does not change the person he has been to each and every one of you. A friend, a colleague, a leader. If I may, I am the only one of us who counted the original Captain Lorca as my friend. You met him, Saru, but you did not know him like I did. And Einar, though you served with him, he was only ever your commander. I assure you, all of the qualities that made my husband such a wonderful captain are also possessed by the Captain Lorca from this world."

Finally something managed to shock Groves. "Your... what? Your _husband?_ "

A ripple passed across Lalana's fur from head to tail. She still found delight in that memory. Her tongue clicked once, but loudly. "Yes. It was a joke we were telling, so we used fake names and it is only legally binding on Risa. He once said out of all our jokes, it was his favorite. Hayliel was so funny! I wish you could have met him. Gabriel is very funny, too. A little meaner in his jokes, but very funny. But again, what does it matter where Gabriel came from? He is still your captain, is he not?"

"He is not," said Saru. "He assumed his command through subterfuge. He is not a member of Starfleet."

"That is true, but he is still the same man who has led you and encouraged you, who fought alongside you, who has helped you become your better selves. Saru, do you not feel that he encouraged you to be a better first officer and showed you how not to be trodden upon by your crewmates? Emellia, has he not provided you with everything you required to find your way alone? And Macarius, can you deny he is your friend?"

O'Malley's hand was shaking on his knee and his eyes were not entirely focused. "I..." It was like a switch flipped. He sat up abruptly and exclaimed, "He stranded us in a parallel universe!"

"Yes, which he only did because he was going to lose Discovery, as you well know, Macarius. He is trying to find a way to send us home. Once he is emperor, it should be a simple matter."

"Once..." Again, Groves was managing to be shocked. It was not an emotion he wore well. "Once he's emperor?"

Saru was reminded of Burnham's words on the bridge. "Lorca poses a grave threat to Starfleet. Our forces are weakened by the war against the Klingons. If Lorca returns to our world with the Terran fleet, Starfleet will not stand a chance. Specialist Burnham also says he intends to kill us now that he has no need of us."

Lalana's dismissal of Burnham's assessment was unequivocal. "That is ridiculous. Gabriel has fought to defend Starfleet and defeat the Klingons and has no issue with working alongside nonhumans and can see the need for them to have a space such as they are afforded in our world. If he did not see it before, he certainly does now. He even went so far as to uphold Starfleet's central tenets when Starfleet Command stood ready to abandon them at Pahvo. He has risked his own life to protect civilians and Starfleet personnel alike. For all that he has made mistakes, he has shown the type of person he is. Even now, he is trying to sort out a way to save the Federation by working with the alien rebels in this universe. Specialist Burnham does not know Gabriel as well as the rest of you, and I do not know upon what she has based her conclusion, but I am certain it is not based on Gabriel."

Saru reached up to his ganglia. It was true Lorca never triggered it directly save for that one instance in null time when he seemed to have momentarily lost his mind and proposed a course of suicide rather than languish in a temporal doldrums. That threat response had been because of one specific proposal, not Lorca himself. His study full of weapons was unnerving, but again, that was more the items than the man who collected them. In every other instance of their interactions, Lorca's presence had elicited the opposite response. He registered not as threat but reassurance.

Several times Burnham had used Saru's ganglia as justification for determining what was safe, yet where Lorca was concerned, she dismissed the ganglia entirely. He realized Burnham used the ganglia as justification only when it was convenient to the narrative _she_ wanted to tell.

She had also taken advantage of the massive shock at her revelation about Lorca's identity as an opportunity to issue orders as if she were in command of Discovery, never once pausing to consider alternatives. They were reasonable commands given the information she provided, but Saru distinctly recalled the usage of the word "might." Lorca _might_ take Discovery back and the Terran fleet alongside it for the purposes of conquering their universe. Had he really told Burnham he intended to kill Discovery's crew in the process? The man who never registered as a direct threat? If he wanted Starfleet gone, why did he fight so hard to defend it? Was he intending to ally with the Klingons? Certainly not, that was lunacy, even for Lorca. Then, was his goal to defeat the Klingons and conquer the Federation afterwards? How was he to do that while embroiled in the aftermath of a coup? Did Lorca foresee such a smooth transition of power for himself that there would be no infighting between the emperor's lingering loyalists and his new government? Even Saru could see the instability promised in the Terran Empire's future, and he was no master tactician like Lorca.

Larsson sighed loudly from his seat. "Unbelievable." He was still stuck on Lalana's reference to poker. It was more like they all thought they were playing checkers while Lorca had been playing chess.

Saru bent at the waist, addressing Larsson. "Lieutenant, you served under the real Captain Lorca. Were there signs we missed?"

Larsson considered that and shrugged. "He did a few things that were a little out there, but uh, that's Gabriel Lorca for you. He's always been a bit extreme. You don't get to be a hero by staying at home. And the man is nothing if not hero of his own story. Honestly? I can barely tell the difference, except that this one apparently wants to be emperor."

"No," said Lalana, "he only wants to be captain. More than anything in both the worlds. Which is why he was willing to risk them both."

"He was already captain," said Saru. "If that were all he desired he would not have brought us here."

"There was—" began O'Malley, uncertain if he could say it, because most of the details had been told to him in a confidence he had no desire to break. "There was an incident. I can't say more than that. But, suffice to say, I think maybe... He might have... coupled with..."

"Can you form a single, complete sentence?" taunted Groves.

O'Malley scarcely noticed the jibe. His mind was on a different track. "The Buran," he said in a near-whisper, looking helplessly at Saru.

Saru was bewildered by the implication. "He appeared after the Buran was destroyed, in an escape pod. That can only mean..."

"He couldn't have," said O'Malley, because he desperately did not want it to be true.

"I think he did," said Saru. "I think he killed Captain Lorca and the crew of the Buran." Saru and O'Malley stared at each other in disbelief that they could have misjudged so greatly the man they admired. Larsson was completely frozen by the suggestion.

Lalana's response was firm. "Of course he didn't! The Buran was destroyed and he used the opportunity to take on the role of Gabriel Lorca in our universe because the opportunity was there, that is all. I should know. I was present when the Buran was destroyed. I did not reach it in time to prevent what happened, but I did see it, and this Captain Lorca had nothing to do with the explosion. It was the Klingons. You must understand, my Hayliel learned something from me. To a lului, the most important thing is being able to choose how you die. Because he loved his crew and didn't want them to suffer, he chose to give them a death that was better than what the Klingons offered. If it seems unthinkable, then allow me to explain to you that the pictures which were leaked of the Klingon torture on Qo'noS... He saw them unedited, and the people in those pictures were his former crewmates. One of them was his oldest and best friend. After seeing that, how could he allow it to happen again?"

Larsson unfroze, pressing a hand firmly over his eyes. That detail had always bothered him, but the way Lalana presented it, he could almost believe it. "So, the captain killed himself."

"To avoid a fate worse than death," said Lalana, gripping her fingers very tightly on the table. O'Malley began to chew on his thumb, contemplating that.

"I don't know," said Larsson, equally hesitant.

"Yes, you do," said Lalana, "because you are willing to throw away your life to save Discovery and its crew. All you had to do was let Petra use the pineapple."

Groves made a face. _Petra?_ He looked at Mischkelovitz. She had not spoken the entire time. She was standing perfectly still save for her eyelids, which were blinking rapidly in thought. That was never a good sign.

"Saru, John, Einar, Emellia, Macarius. Please, we must help the captain. He erred when he brought us here, but he only did so because he was scared, so scared to lose Discovery and all of you. He panicked and made a terrible mistake. But please, tell me, do we judge the people we love by the worst mistakes they make?"

O'Malley was finally shaken back out of his stupor. He looked over at Mischkelovitz. He already knew his answer to that question. He had lived it once before. There was an awful knot in his stomach at the thought he was about to live it again.

Mischkelovitz finally spoke. "I don't love him," she said, "and I have work to do, so everyone but Einar, get out of my lab."


	90. Together We Fly

A/N: I swear it is not my intention to continue with this episode indefinitely (you can only delay the inevitable so long), but for the moment, we are still in episode 13, "What's Past Is Prologue."

Also, sincerest apologies for the delay. I am at Sci-Fi Scarborough this weekend, so I've been busy the past few days getting ready and then traveling. (If you're going, do drop me a line!)

EDIT: One more quick apology for any confusion about the chapter title; I accidentally posted with the title for the next chapter when this first went up. This chapter is "Together We Fly." Next chapter is "Find Me and Follow Me."

* * *

As acting captain, Saru was needed in more places than he could be, so he left O'Malley with a single directive: debrief Lalana and report any relevant intel from the Charon. To allow Mischkelovitz the privacy she requested, Groves, O'Malley, and Lalana adjourned to her room. This was as far as Lalana was willing to stray from Larsson's side under the circumstances.

Larsson's parting words were, "Different after the Buran? Really, Lalana? You two assholes deserve each other." But he snorted in dim amusement and Lalana clicked her tongue because their friendship was predicated on this exact sort of lovingly contemptible enmity for one another and it was as much a reassurance as a lightly humorous condemnation of a joke she had made at Larsson's expense.

It remained warm in Lalana's room. Not as warm as it had been—that miserable temperature had entirely been for the purposes of supplying Lorca with an excuse not to stay over—but to the level of a modest tropical morning. O'Malley removed his uniform tunic and Groves his jacket, revealing an incongruously irreverent civilian-issue t-shirt featuring a blocky cactus monster graphic from some old Earth game. Lalana brought up the main lab feed of Larsson and Mischkelovitz on her viewscreen so she could keep an eye on her friend and be ready to return at the first sign of trouble and hopped onto her perch behind the couch just above O'Malley and Groves' heads.

"Tell us everything," said O'Malley, draping his tunic over the arm of the couch. "After you tied up the other me, you found Gabriel in a torture chamber?"

Lalana recounted the process of hiding near the ceiling, waiting for Larsson, who failed to arrive at the appointed time, the subsequent arrival of Captain Maddox, and the death of Kerrigan. "It was terrible to think he died again," said Lalana. "Even if I did not like him, or even know this version of him, the Matthew Kerrigan I knew was not a bad person and I do not think he was such in this world, either. No one should have to die like that." Then she explained how Lorca faked a cardiac event, caused Maddox to open the agonizer booth, and killed him.

"And then John Allan appeared."

The simplicity of this statement completely underplayed the significance of it. O'Malley's eyes went so wide they were more white than blue.

"Man, talk about burying the lede," said Groves. "Maybe next time start with the important part first."

"Every moment we experience is a cumulative result of the moments that led up to it," countered Lalana. "To understand where you are, you must know the path that brought you there." Lorca would have liked the aphorism, though the lengthy preamble to Allan's appearance would have aggravated him as much as it was aggravating Groves. Lalana was treating this more like story time than a proper report.

"And then what?" said O'Malley, eager to keep things moving.

"He said he was there to deliver the truth and a message. His message was that he did not forgive Gabriel for what he had done to Emellia."

"What did he do to Mischka?" asked Groves.

"I do not know, he did not say."

O'Malley had an idea what Allan was referring to. "Don't worry about it, it's nothing."

"His truth was that Gabriel had been given a gift he did not deserve. He had a recording of Emellia which he said was not from the future, but from another timeline..."

This was where the story strained O'Malley's ability to follow it, but Groves sat forward and listened in rapt attention, poring over every word. Mischkelovitz's reference to monsters in history needing to stick together, her stated desire to sacrifice herself for the purposes of righting a wrong and making sure no one was alone, a message Allan received from himself.

Then the changes themselves. Two nudges to put their universe's Lorca on the Triton and throw Lalana in his path, one further tweak to cause null time. In-between, a decade Allan spent guarding Mischkelovitz, but perhaps not Mischkelovitz, another version of her.

The question was, _why?_ Mischkelovitz gave both Lorcas time with Lalana because she did not want them to be alone? This was the claim, but she had done this for the same man who, ten minutes ago, she said she did not love? Something was not adding up. Groves felt like he was standing next to a tall hedge and being asked to buy the property on the other side without knowing whether it was a mansion, a shack, or an empty patch of dirt.

From exactly how far in the future had this message come?

"I do not know," was Lalana's answer. "But John Allan said that the timeline was correcting itself."

"Well, that's complete baloney," said Groves. The statement made one thing abundantly clear. The other John was a time traveler who had _no clue_ how time travel worked.

O'Malley was flummoxed by the whole thing. "What I don't understand is why Allan would tell _Gabriel_ , of all people?"

"Like that's the only thing you don't understand," said Groves.

"I think he just wanted to share his story," said Lalana. This logic made perfect sense to her.

O'Malley's eyes went wide. That wasn't it _at all_. There was only one reason anyone ever gloated like that, especially someone who had all the reason in two universes to keep his mouth shut and had done as much for a dozen years. "He had nothing to lose," said O'Malley. "He didn't think Gabriel would tell anyone, and anyone that he did tell..."

O'Malley's head shook in disbelief. His sinuses were tense with dread. It felt as if his heart had dropped into his stomach and shattered into a hundred pieces of ice which were cutting away at him from the inside. He covered his mouth. He felt like vomiting, but he had not eaten anything in several hours and the only tangible manifestation of this impulse was a burn of acid he managed to swallow.

"What is wrong?" asked Lalana.

O'Malley's hand fell away. "He—He didn't have anything to lose! He'd only tell us this if we were all going to die!"

Lalana hunched down on her perch, curling her tail around her body and shifting her lower half to a dark blue-black shade that matched the hammock fabric. If O'Malley was right, she had to get back to the Charon no matter what.

Groves completely disregarded O'Malley's conclusion. "Don't be dumb. Obviously some version of Mischka survived in some timeline, and Allan didn't tell _all_ of us. He just told Lorca and Lalana. Not that it would matter if he did tell us all, since it sounds like he's planning on resetting the time loop."

"That would be very difficult for John Allan to do, as he is dead," Lalana informed them, her color shifting back to blue.

Silence. Then Groves said, "Cool, how'd that happen?"

"After he told Gabriel all of this, he wondered what I have would have chosen if I had been given the choice. He did not realize I was there and when I answered him, Gabriel used John Allan's surprise to kill him and prevent him from warning himself in the future, as you recommended, John."

Groves suddenly barked in laughter. "He did it!" he exclaimed and was subsequently consumed by hysterics. The laughs were loud, sharp, and entirely unsuited to the occasion.

O'Malley was horrified, exclaiming, "A man is dead! That's not funny!" Even if O'Malley and Allan were not friends, Allan had been a fixture of both Mischkelovitzs' lives for twelve years and that made him almost family. Lorca killing him somehow made the circumstances of the death even worse.

The barking laughter continued. Groves could not contain himself. His laughs turned to gasps, tears squeezed from his eyes, and he hyperventilated into his hands for a few moments. He was thoroughly unable to prevent this overwhelming display. It was alarming enough that O'Malley reached out a hand to Groves' shoulder. Groves violently shrugged it away.

"There are many things which are funny, but this is not one of them," chided Lalana.

"I'm sorry!" gasped Groves, finally catching his breath. He clasped his hands and sat there on the couch, despondently embarrassed at his inability to control his own emotions. That a single set of chemical protocols administered to a three-year-old could still have such potent effects thirty-three years later was an enduring testament to folly of well-meaning but narcissistic parents.

The remaining details—Lorca summoning allies for his coup, Petrellovitz and her toxin—seemed almost routine after the revelations of the encounter with Allan. At the point of the tale where Lalana, Larsson, and Petrellovitz reached the shuttle, Groves abruptly stood up and left without a word. He appeared on the viewscreen exchanging words with Mischkelovitz in the lab.

"Do you want me to continue?" asked Lalana.

O'Malley was still reeling and trying to process the ramifications of Allan revealing everything to Lorca. "Did anything in particular happen on the shuttle? Important, I mean."

"Einar destroyed the pineapple to prevent the other Emellia from taking over Discovery. Do you think John will make me another one? I must return to the Charon and I do not think Saru will give me access to the shuttle."

"You can't," said O'Malley. "There's an issue with the mycelial reactor. We have to destroy it, Lalana. And the ship..."

"That is why I must go. I did not make it to Gabriel's side the first time. I will not fail again."

"You mean...?"

"There is nothing more important to a lului."

* * *

Groves emerged from Lalana's room with an angry glare on his face. "Mischka! We need to talk."

"I'm busy," she replied. She was taking samples of tissue from Larsson's left arm. It remained visually unblemished, but to a careful eye, there were tiny spots emerging onto the surface of his remaining skin from within. The whites of his eyes were stained like tobacco.

"Now," said Groves, and because of the risks posed by the historical record, he signaled her to use the emergency backup protocol they had created in the event their main algorithm was compromised. " _Kelemne vas_. Unless you gave him this algorithm, too?"

Mischkelovitz dropped the tissue extractor she was holding and straightened, looking at Groves with angry indignation. "I didn't give him any algorithms!" she shouted. " _Deydo perosii kelaten!_ "

There was no translation anyone but a QORYA subject could have offered for that. As much as it sounded similar, it was a sentence generated from a totally different source pattern. Lorca might have tried to guess it contextually and concluded it was "stop accusing me of that" or "especially not this one." One of these was correct.

"Ay ku'rettah ya doss!" responded Groves, which was either "I had to be sure" or "I believe you."

The conversation that followed could have been about any number of things. It was, of course, about time travel.

"[You sent Lan on a mission to change time. Maybe you can explain that one to me?]"

"[I didn't do that.]"

"[Time isn't linear.]"

A pause. "[Okay, so I did. What and why?]"

"[That's what I'm asking. Three points of change, two causalities...]"

Mischkelovitz listened. Larsson listened, too, he just had no idea to what. At the end of it, she said, "[I don't know, Rove.]"

"[How can you not know? This is you we're talking about.]"

"[A me-who-isn't-me. Time may not be linear but my perception of it is. Can you explain what you're doing a year from now? What about tomorrow?]"

"[Tomorrow we'll be dead, so I don't expect it matters.]"

"[We were dead yesterday, so that's only natural.]"

"Ha!" said Groves. Her comment was thankfully not hysterical, but it was solidly amusing because time wasn't linear. "[We have to kill this algorithm soon, but I thought you should know.]" The emergency protocol utilized a simpler pattern than regular qoryan. If they used it for too long, it would be possible to reverse-engineer a translation.

"[Thank you. You're my third-favorite brother.]"

Her second-favorite brother emerged from the rear of the lab with Lalana in tow. "Melly!" he barked, unusually authoritarian. "Any luck with Larsson?"

There was guilt in Mischkelovitz's expression because she had just wasted five minutes talking about Allan's time travel shenanigans instead of focusing on a man who was literally dying in front of her. "Right now I'm trying to compensate for the genetic blecompression of his—"

O'Malley had no time for that. "Just level with me. Do you think you can save him or not?"

Her head shook.

"Ah, it's okay," said Larsson, reaching over to pat Mischkelovitz's hand. It took him two tries to correctly complete the motion. His first attempt missed her entirely and he swatted the air. He was starting to get feverish again and his vision was filled with little whorls of distortion.

The pending failure did not bother O'Malley. "Right, then. Lalana and I have an idea."

* * *

There was a problem. Examining the function of the super-mycelial reactor in detail, Stamets realized it was like a dam, blocking the flow of the network's spores to harness exotic particles from it. These particles were jammed up. Their photon torpedo would not be enough to remove the blockage.

The senior crew gathered in the engineering lab to discuss potential solutions. By loading a warhead with their remaining harvested spores, they would be able to initiate a chain reaction capable of destroying the reactor's influence.

It would require using all of their spores. None left to get them home, and they would need to be close to get the shot. So close, the shock wave from the explosion would incinerate them.

The tension in the room shifted at this revelation. They could save the universe—every universe—but they would have to sacrifice themselves.

Saru stepped forward, wading out into this ocean of fear and tension, but there was no fear in him.

"It is well-known that my species has the ability to sense the coming of death," he told them. "I do not sense it today. I may not have all the answers, however, I do know that I am surrounded by a team I trust. The finest a captain could ever hope to command. Lorca abused our idealism. And make no mistake, Discovery is no longer Lorca's. She is ours. And today will be her maiden voyage.

As he spoke, the faces around him changed. He could feel the tide shifting. Their fears were falling away, replaced by a sense of purpose.

"We have a duty to perform, and we will not accept a no-win scenario. You have your orders. On your way."

The chorus of "aye, captain" that answered him made clear one important thing.

Discovery had a new captain.

In the wake of this, O'Malley arrived. "Captain," he said, approaching Saru, "we need to talk."

Saru had joined Tilly at her workstation to review the specifics of the blast that would destroy Discovery unless they could find a way around it. "Can it wait?"

"A man's life is on the line," said O'Malley.

Saru motioned for O'Malley to join him to the side. Tilly could still overhear them, but only bits and snippets.

"I know how important it is to you to get everyone home," O'Malley began.

Saru cut him off. "That may no longer be an option," he said, and briefly explained the situation.

"Well, if you don't think we're going to die, I have full faith in that," said O'Malley. "You're the only scientist has ever made sense to me."

It seemed to be a compliment of the highest order. Saru gestured for O'Malley to continue.

"Larsson isn't going to make it. Medbay's not having any luck, neither is Melly, and time is running out, which means our best bet is to treat him is to find an antidote on the Charon."

"I will advise Burnham to seek one when she next makes contact."

"Saru, we're not talking hours here. Maybe two hours. Probably more like one, if he's lucky. Can you guarantee me Burnham will make contact within and be able to locate an antidote in that time frame?"

Saru did not even try to. There was no guarantee of that. The situation aboard the Charon was full of unknowns. "Did Lalana have any useful intel?"

"Not as such. But Larsson's already in with Lorca and his followers, and by all accounts, they have a fair shot at gaining control of the ship. Let's stop flying in warp circles and let me go over there with Larsson to find an antidote."

"We must remain at warp to avoid being boarded," said Saru.

"Boarded? By who?"

"The Terrans."

"Why would they board us? They think we're Terrans, don't they?"

"The existence of our spore drive has been compromised. From what I can tell, the Terran thirst for power is formidable. Any number of them may seek to obtain the power of our drive for themselves. Our role now is too important to risk capture. There is also the issue of Lorca's followers. Lorca knows full well our drive's capabilities. We must assume his followers have been ordered to come after us and seize the ship."

"The emperor apparently rounded up most of his people and put them in torture booths on the Charon, so they've got their hands full right now. I'm not suggesting we hang around. Just drop out of warp long enough for me to beam over. And raise the shields right after. We do it quick enough, we're a momentary blip on their sensors."

"The Charon also has shields," pointed out Saru. "You will not be able to board it."

"We'll put on EV suits and beam just outside shield range."

"That's..." Saru trailed off because there was something tactically ingenious about that. (As much as this seemed to reflect well on O'Malley's tactical prowess, it was actually Lalana's idea. Lorca had done something similar against Gresh's pirate installation a decade earlier.)

"I have to believe, despite everything, Gabriel will let us aboard. And there's the issue of dropping the shield around their mycelial reactor, isn't there?"

"I have no reason to doubt that Burnham will accomplish this objective."

"Which is great, but everyone succeeds until the moment they don't. I know that better than most. Let's not have the moment the universe is depending on us be the first time Michael Burnham fails. I'll look for the antidote and in case Burnham can't get the shield down, I will. Too many lives are riding on this. We may not get another chance. And while I hate to bring this up, by some quirk of fate, I am technically the highest-ranking officer on this ship, so I could order you, but I'm not Discovery's captain. You are, and in this universe, maybe my rank means nothing. I just want the chance to save the man whose life I've been charged with. I can't lose anyone else on my watch. It's bad enough what's happened to Allan. Please, _captain_ , let me do this. And I promise you, I won't make a move until I've confirmed Burnham's status one way or the other."

It was true, what O'Malley had once said to Lorca in a drunken ramble. He was an emotional sniper, and he'd just hit his mark. "Very well," said Saru. "Make the preparations."

"Thank you, captain." O'Malley went to leave and Saru to rejoin Tilly at her station, but Tilly went dashing after O'Malley, stopping him at the door.

"Colonel?" she said. "You're a good man."

O'Malley smiled sadly at her. "Oh, how I wish that were the case," he said.

A man's life was on the line. Just not the man she, Saru, and everyone else thought.

* * *

Ten minutes later, Lalana, Larsson and O'Malley were in Transporter Room 1, suiting up. Larsson could not get his EV suit on by himself. While a crewman assisted him, Lalana left Larsson's side and approached O'Malley. There was something in her tail. "Can you give this to Gabriel?"

It was a fortune cookie. O'Malley crouched down and opened the hard compartment on the side of the suit. Lalana slipped the cookie inside. The compartment would not protect the cookie from the vacuum of space, but it would keep it from being crushed.

"Thank you," she said.

"Don't thank me yet. I haven't actually done anything."

Lalana's tail drifted up to O'Malley's face and pressed against his left cheek, the only part of his flesh left exposed by the EV Suit. Her epithelial filaments filtered through his skin. It tingled. "If you do not succeed, I will never forgive you or myself."

O'Malley cupped his right hand against the side of her face. The glove made the gesture seem cold and impersonal when it was anything but. "I feel exactly, exactly the same."

She released him. O'Malley stepped onto the transporter and put on his helmet, taking his place beside Larsson. "Ready when you are, captain," he announced, voice slightly tinny from inside the helmet.

Larsson saluted Lalana and smiled at her. She waved her tail in reply and tried not to think too much about her fact her best friend's entire face was a toxic shade of brown.

On the bridge, Saru issued the order to take them out of warp, maximum transporter range. "Energize."

"Transport complete, shields up," reported Owosekun.

"Take us back to warp."

"Charon hailing."

"Ignore it," said Saru. "Resume our evasive warp pattern. I will be in the engineering lab."

Now it was up to him, Tilly, and Stamets to find a way to save them all. Unless they found a way to counteract the force of the explosion, it would not matter who was on Discovery and who was on the Charon, or whether or not Larsson ever got his antidote. They were all going to die.


	91. Find Me and Follow Me

A/N: Takes place during episode 13, "What's Past is Prologue." Again, sorry for the title mix-up for those of you receiving e-mail alerts. This chapter is "Find Me and Follow Me." Previous one was "Together We Fly."

* * *

They moved through the darkened halls of the Charon, picking off guards and Georgiou's loyalists as they went. The throne room was deserted, as if it had been waiting for them. Lorca's footsteps echoed through the space as he approached the emperor's dais, Landry and Stamets behind him.

"You believe in destiny now, Mr. Stamets?" he asked.

"That's, uh, rhetorical, right?" replied Stamets. There was a hint of disdain in his voice.

Two soldiers rushed by Lorca to sweep the area around the dais for any hidden threats. "Your lack of vision continues to disappoint me," said Lorca, walking up the steps. "I used to suffer from that, too."

The emperor's favorite sword was still in its sheath on the dais. Lorca drew it out. It was a glittery blade, facets of molded silver and gold detail shining in the gold and blue of the throne room's lights. Gaudy and inelegant, like the emperor herself.

Lorca studied its length with disgust. "But nothing that's happened to me was an accident. Not ending up in another world, not finding a ship that would help me return here, none of it. I'm living proof that fate is real." His steps took him back towards Stamets as he spoke. He could feel it, too. How perfectly everything was slipping together. "Speaking of which, we've reached the tipping point where your usefulness to me is outweighed by the risk of keeping you alive. I mean, I'm never gonna trust you. Honestly."

Stamets had betrayed them. The one thing Lorca did not tolerate was betrayal, as Harry Mudd had learned the hard way on the Klingon prison ship. Even if Stamets felt his betrayal entirely justified because Lorca had allowed the theft of Stamets' research by Petrellovitz, the fact remained Stamets had sold them all out and too many people were dead and tortured as a result, this universe's Michael Burnham among them.

Every gun around Stamets pointed towards him. Everyone wanted to be the one who would deal the fatal blow to the one man who had caused them months of endless suffering.

Lorca nodded to a crewman standing at the operations console to the side of the room. A hexagonal section of flooring retracted, revealing the super-mycelial reactor's orb far below. The containment field that protected them from the orb's massive power shimmered in patterns of blue.

"The living core of the mycelial network," Lorca said, smiling. It wasn't just a power source capable of cowing a universe, it was equally the thing that had brought him back where he belonged. "It's poetic justice, don't you think? Scientist destroyed by his own creation?"

There was a laugh in Lorca's voice, and for a moment, Stamets looked almost hopeful.

"Just kidding," said Lorca. "I hate poetry." He preferred stories of adventure and action. Landry's phaser fired and Stamets flickered into twists of red flame. The panel in the floor slid shut.

Landry's communicator chirped and she flipped it open and read the message. "Sir, I'm getting word of an unauthorized ship-to-ship transmission."

"That'll be my Burnham," Lorca said, feeling a sense of relief. He could see it so perfectly now. The universe was drawing her right to him. "Location?"

The crewman at the operations console looked for the information. "Can't tell, sir. Internal sensors are still offline."

"Where'd the transmission come from?" asked Landry.

It took what seemed like an abominably long time to run a trace on the transmission, but with so many computer systems still disabled, there was nothing anyone could do until the ship was fully under their control and back at full operational strength.

Finally an answer came. "The transmission originated on Deck 3."

"Go take a look," Lorca said to Landry. "And remember, I don't care what she does to you, Burnham's not to be harmed. We need her. She's integral to our future plans."

"Yes, sir," said Landry, but even if Lorca had used the plural, she thought it sounded like he was stating something more personal.

Landry headed out. Lorca signaled the crewman. "Shipwide broadcast. Video."

Across every monitor and viewscreen on the Charon, Lorca's face appeared. His voice was weary but confident.

"Hello, Michael. Judging from your communications hack, you're somewhere on the third deck. Where, precisely, I can't tell, but no matter. I'm not gonna hunt you down. I'll wait for you to come to me."

Burnham answered. Her video appeared in the air in front of him, full of defiance. "What makes you think I'd do that?" she demanded.

"Because you belong here."

"With you?"

"In the real world. I know that's hard for you to see right now, because you're blinded by your emotions." There was a clue for her in that, an allusion to Vulcans he dared not speak aloud when so many on both sides were listening, and equally a truth. That other universe had been a dream. He was awake now. With each passing moment, he felt it more and more: the pulse of victory, the blood-hot ebb and flow of the universe swirling around him, the taste of a miracle on the air.

"The only thing I was blinded by was you," she responded coldly.

Lorca's tongue clicked. She seemed not to understand what he was saying. The other Burnham would have. Over the years, they had perfected the art of speaking on two levels at once: Words that seemed to be one thing on the surface hiding another layer of meaning. He'd shared such words with this Burnham, too, and with Mischkelovitz. Allusions to truth hidden in plain sight both Burnham and Mischkelovitz, two of the smartest people in that universe, had entirely missed.

"I know you understand that I had to lie to you, Michael," he said. "To get home. Just like you know that the Federation is a social experiment doomed to failure. Childish idealism. Every species, every choice, every opinion is not equal. No matter how much they want it to be. The strong and the capable will always rise. Like you and me. And every living being is safer and happier knowing their place. That's why we have a duty to lead. Like what you did that day at the Binaries. Stay with me. Stay here and help me bring peace to _this_ world through strength and order, the right way.

"There was no one else like the other you. What she and I set out to achieve was gonna be remarkable. And then I met you. And the truth is... your _gifts_ far surpass hers. I see you, Michael Burnham. I see your power. And I'm offering you a future. I have since the day I brought you onto the Discovery. Take it."

The video feed of Burnham vanished in a shimmer of distortion. Landry appeared in her place.

Landry's soft sigh was entirely telling. Landry had failed. In a different way than the Landry in the other universe, but a failure all the same. "She rerouted the feed and disabled the carrier address," Landry reported. "She could be anywhere."

Lorca tried to hide it, but he grimaced in disappointment, inhaling shakily through his nose. "She'll come," he said, remembering Lalana's words. He had earned himself this Burnham through all the trials and tribulations he had endured in both universes.

The minutes ticked by. They worked to secure more of the Charon's systems, but Petrellovitz was a hard opponent for any systems tech, even in absentia. She had not just disabled systems, she had scrambled them according to her own particular algorithms. Unscrambling them was hard work without her. They were getting there, but at this rate, he really needed Sarek to turn up before any captains loyal to Georgiou did. As it was, his people were stretched thin rounding up any survivors to obtain oaths of loyalty from the willing and mete out judgment to the rest.

Lorca wondered if Petrellovitz had made it to her destination or been caught en route by Georgiou's people. He almost regretted killing Stamets. Almost. That death had been long overdue and there was no denying he found a very real satisfaction in it.

"Sir, detecting a ship coming out of warp!" They had limited external sensors now. "It's... the Discovery!"

"Hail them," said Lorca, thinking Petrellovitz had come back as promised and brought a present with her.

"No answer. They went back to warp."

Lorca was filled with sudden dread. "What's our shield status!"

"Shields are online."

"Any power fluctuations? Any transporter signals?" His voice rose in alarm with each new demand.

"No sign of any outbound signals, no change in shields."

Burnham had not beamed off the Charon, then. That was a relief, but it raised new questions. He struggled to think of the tactical implications of Discovery's action. "Scan where they were, look for any debris." Maybe they had dropped off a shuttle to collect her or some sort of package drifting towards the Charon.

"Sir, transmission incoming. It's a personal comm."

"Let's hear it."

The voice on the other end was labored. "Larsson... reporting..."

Another voice filtered through, a local comm audible over Larsson's channel. The accent was unmistakable. "Einar? Einar, stay with me."

Lorca's hand closed around one of the tubes surrounding the dais of the throne. It was a delivery of a sort. "Can we get a lock on them?" Internal sensors were still a mess. The crewman at the console worked to cross-reference external sensors with the comm signal and transporters.

"I have them, sir," he reported. "Energizing now."

There was a twinkling shimmer of white. Lorca squinted at the brightness at it. Two EV suits appeared in the middle of the throne room, laying on the ground. Lorca's soldiers pointed their rifles at both. The suit on the left reached up and removed its helmet. The suit on the right did not move.

O'Malley stared at Lorca a moment, helmet in his hands, looking like a deer in the headlights. Then he looked at the guns around him. "I'm unarmed," he said. Absolutely none of the people around him cared about this detail.

"Get him out," ordered Lorca, flicking a finger at Larsson's prone form. O'Malley began removing his gloves.

"Sir," said Landry, stepping onto the stairs before the throne and pointing her phaser directly at O'Malley's face. "You can't trust a word he says. Just because he doesn't have a weapon doesn't mean he's not dangerous." Two hundred and twelve days had taught her and everyone else trapped on the Charon that fact. The O'Malley they knew had ways to hurt that went far beyond what the agonizer booths could do.

"I assure you, I'm not here to cause trouble," said O'Malley.

"Oh, yeah?" retorted Landry. "Tell that to him." She jerked her head at Larsson.

The helmet was off now, revealing red-brown patterns wrinkled onto Larsson's skin like thick layers of lace. Larsson's greying blonde hair looked almost pure silver next to the shade.

"Macarian venom," said Landry.

O'Malley's face fell. He could hear it, plain as day. They had been operating under the assumption Petrellovitz had developed this poison and thus perhaps Mischkelovitz could solve it, but in this universe, Petrellovitz was not interested in human biology. It was not her poison. It never had been. It was his. Taken, he realized, from his mirror counterpart's workshop at the same time as the pineapple.

"I came back for the antidote!" blurted O'Malley.

"Oh, that's rich," said Landry, shaking her head.

"Enough, commander," said Lorca. "Mac. What the hell are you doing?"

"Um," said O'Malley, reaching into the hard compartment on the side of the suit. "I come bearing gifts?" He pulled out the fortune cookie and offered it up to Lorca.

Lorca strode down from the dais, took the cookie, and grabbed O'Malley's hand, pulling him to his feet. "You shouldn't have," said Lorca, grinning in delight.

"Well, probably not, but seeing as I'm here. Tit for tat?"

* * *

The first order of business was Larsson's antidote. "There isn't one," said Landry. "He knows that." She was still holding her phaser on O'Malley. Lorca had ordered his forces to lower their weapons, but Landry was a special case. She trusted her own tactical assessments and lowered her guard only when she felt it wise. Lorca respected that. She was worth the allowance.

"Does he?" asked Lorca, the sort of rhetorical question that was entirely an indication of a flawed assumption. "I came back from another universe. I didn't say I came back alone."

"So this is the other O'Malley," mused Landry. "You bring another me with you?"

Lorca made a face. He did not want this to turn into a _thing_ of everyone asking about their alternate universe counterparts.

"She died in the line of duty," offered O'Malley.

"Pity," said Landry remorselessly.

 _Sort of_ , thought O'Malley, but kept it himself. If ever there were a case for the two universes being the same, it was probably Ellen Landry. Not that she deserved to die, but she had taken a little too much glee in locking up Groves, among many other rather unsavory moments she justified as being representative of her duties. No wonder Lorca liked her so much. The other Landry had been a taste of home. "There's nothing we can do?"

"You can shoot him and put him out of his misery," was Landry's assessment. O'Malley was horrified by the suggestion.

They woke Larsson and stood him up. "Up to you, Einar," said Lorca, presenting Larsson with his options.

"You know," said Larsson, "I should have died on the Buran, like everyone else." Larsson was oblivious to the existence of Allan's interventions—this was survivor's guilt on his part, pure and simple—but it was true all the same. From Lorca's perspective, Allan was right: destiny was correcting the timeline. A man who should never have lived was being killed by an incurable toxin.

O'Malley remained hopeful. "They might yet find a solution on Discovery. Just give them a chance!"

"There never was an antidote," said Larsson feverishly. "She was lying, that other one, the whole time. Tell Lalana I choose this death. The one captain I liked serving under. I had three, you know. First one I hated. Second one I hated. Third one I liked. Ah, four. The fourth one was different than the third. Wasn't you, captain?"

The English was mangled, but Lorca understood. "Was I now?"

"Different, same," said Larsson, and then repeated the words. "All captain. Tell Lalana I choose death. I choose dying on Buran. It's good, captain. It's good." He said something in Swedish.

"You'll see Kerrigan again," promised Lorca, raising his phaser.

O'Malley looked away, wincing at the momentary, metallic reverberation of the shot. His eyes squeezed shut and he shook like a leaf. Lorca holstered the phaser with a frown. O'Malley talked a good game about survival, but when it came down to it, he clearly did not have what it took to live in this universe. It was a pity he had been dragged along.

"Mac," said Lorca sharply, gesturing for O'Malley to follow him.

Landry almost jumped between them. "Are you sure you can trust him, sir?"

Lorca smiled, turning the cookie over in his fingers. "With my life," he said.

Their destination was a small chamber off the throne room: a quiet, dark place designed to offer a moment's respite from the demands of the throne. The walls were black, lit by recessed blue lights accented by little gold sconces with a hammered texture that scattered tiny patterns of light around them. There was a small, round, black enameled table ringed by semicircle benches in the middle of the room. A tray of tea sat cold and abandoned.

This was Georgiou's private audience chamber for those more personal interactions best held away from the throne room attendants and crowd. Lorca recalled sitting at the table with Michael and Georgiou some fifteen years back. There was a moment, brief, where they had almost felt like a little family and he could hear the memory of his own laughter.

Lorca traced his hand along the surface of the table, streaking it with fingerprints. There was another memory here. In that memory, the laughter was not his own.

* * *

The memory began somewhere else. A party, the sort that was more shadows than light, where pleasure was intermingled with pain and the guests were not the ones dancing. Flesh tones pale to midnight were arrayed in a demonstration of the breadth of the Terran Empire's reach. The skin on the dancers was unblemished. They were slaves of the highest quality designated for the personal pleasure and entertainment of the emperor. It would not do to have them marked with the dirty underbelly of poor service. The moment they were, their lives in this caste were over and they were relegated to second tier services for the lesser ranks, or if their offense had been particularly disgraceful, menial labor.

There was one dancer, gyrating in an almost trancelike state. She had eyes like emeralds. They sparkled beneath the veneer of dim desperation as she moved and twirled. It felt like she was not moving in tandem with the music but to a music all her own and he wanted to know the tune.

"Something you like?"

The voice cut through Lorca's reverie like a scalpel. He was the emperor's newly-appointed right hand and it required him to be attentive of her at all times for his own sake as much as Georgiou's desire that he do so. To allow himself to become enraptured in something that was not Georgiou was a tactical error on his part.

"You have good taste," said Georgiou. "Looks almost human, doesn't she? Don't be fooled."

"I wasn't," he replied, a tad drier than he usually addressed her. They were more than a few drinks in at this point. He was careful to keep the emperor a drink or two ahead of him, but it was impossible to avoid drinking entirely. Georgiou would find lack of participation in her soiree rude.

"Take her for the night," said Georgiou.

"Emperor, really, that's not necessary."

"My personal gift to you for your fine service, Gabriel," she said. She smiled and raised her cup to him. There was no refusing a gift from the emperor. He raised his in return and smiled back. It was like a snake smiling at a bear.

Georgiou spoke to an attendant and the dancer was waiting in his guest room when he retired for the night. She did not speak at first. She danced for him, again to a music only she could hear, each step taking her closer to him until finally she was near enough to touch him.

When she finally did, he flinched. He did not intend it and his face colored with shame but his head was swimming too much to prevent the involuntary reaction.

His first thought was to grab her, throw her onto the bed, seize control, but she knelt down in front of him and looked up at him with those sparkling green eyes and said, "Whatever you need me to do. Slowly?"

He swallowed. "Slow," he agreed, and she went slowly and she listened to his words and his reactions in equal measure until there was a sense of safety.

"I love you," he said at the end of it.

"We've only just met," she chided. "You don't know me."

This was true, he did not know her, he only knew how she made him feel. He grabbed her and pressed against her with youthful abandon and he was too forceful by far, but she let him.

"Do you want to know a secret?" she asked. He mumbled an assent at her. "Sex should always be a kindness shared between two people. An openness by which two become one. Too many _take_. If you learn to give, you will find you receive more in return."

This went counter to everything he had ever known, but then, so did what they had just done.

Lorca looked for her again in the weeks and months that followed. Sometimes when he was in the emperor's company he found her. Each time was better than the time before. It even made Georgiou's occasional requests tolerable. "I'll take that one," he ordered the harem overseer one day.

"These are the emperor's slaves."

"And I'm her right hand." This was argument enough for him to get his way.

He began to wonder if there was some way to convince Georgiou to give him the green-eyed woman permanently. At another party, he watched her dance with a small smile as he sipped his drink, reveling in the fact the music and rhythm she danced to was an intimacy they now shared.

To his chagrin, the emperor chose the green-eyed woman for herself that night. She offered him another slave instead, a gift he of course accepted, doing his best to hide his disappointment.

He had never been very good at hiding his emotions. He should have realized that in the moment, but it was the end of the night and he was moderately drunk and a little angry. He threw the slave he had been gifted for the evening out before they were even halfway done.

In the morning, the emperor called for him. She was in the throne room and she crooked her finger at him to follow her into the side room where she always had a tray of tea waiting should the whim take her.

There was no tea today. As he stared into those green eyes, once bright and now lifeless, he was gripped by fear, shock, and revulsion.

Georgiou laughed, glad to see she had finally found something capable of disarming him. "Remember, Gabriel. Everything you are is because of me. What I give I can take away. What do you say to that?"

"Yes, emperor." The words were empty, soulless.

"But I am no tyrant, Gabriel. I will allow you to pick one of my other slaves to take with you on your new command. Any which you wish."

"Thank you, emperor. Generous of you."

"You may reflect upon my generosity," she said, moving to leave. She paused at the door. "It is a shame. I liked her." Then Georgiou was gone.

There was a dark ripple across the surface of the table. Lorca traced his fingers through it and they came away red.

* * *

"Gabriel?"

Lorca's eyebrows raised for the faintest moment in recognition. He gestured for O'Malley to sit but remained standing as he cracked his fortune cookie open and passed the paper down to O'Malley to read. He wanted to savor the taste of this cookie. It was his first one in a while. Most people did not eat fortune cookies for the taste, but after so long without this tiny, familiar comfort, it was wonderful. He chewed slowly until the cookie hit that delightful consistency of warm mush that made it taste like unbaked dough.

"Seek to identify in yourself what you love in others," said O'Malley.

"Hm," said Lorca.

O'Malley put the paper on the table near Lorca. "So now I know what it is you've been hiding. Another universe."

"What do you think?" asked Lorca, putting the second half of the cookie in his mouth.

"It's dark," said O'Malley. "Which isn't the worst thing. I mean, look at my complexion, I burn like butcher paper."

Lorca started laughing. A fortune cookie and a joke. O'Malley really had brought wonderful gifts. The laugh died into a sigh. "Is that all you brought me? How about my ship?" Lorca sat down on the other bench.

"Ah, well, everyone on Discovery knows who you are and what you did, they're not happy about it, and, um, it's not your ship any more. It's Saru's."

So it was mutiny, then, sort of. Lorca picked the paper fortune back up from the table and held it pinched between his thumb and forefinger. He could tell O'Malley really hated delivering bad news. "What was this, then? Consolation prize?"

"That," said O'Malley, "was from Lalana, because it may be Saru's ship, but that doesn't mean there's no place for you on it."

Lorca sniffed at that. As if he wanted to be anything other than Discovery's captain. His lip twitched in displeasure.

O'Malley's voice dropped into something dire. "I need to ask you a question, and I need you to answer it honestly." He folded his hands and fixed Lorca with an intense gaze, blue eyes locking onto blue.

Lorca snorted and shrugged. "Depends on the question," he said with a cheeky grin. It was inappropriate levity as usual.

There was a plea in O'Malley's eyes as he asked simply, "Did you kill our Captain Lorca and the crew of the Buran?"

No answer was necessary. Lorca's face said it all.

He could see the moment O'Malley's heart broke. The colonel's expression, usually so wry and amused or annoyed, twisted with anguish. O'Malley started to cry.

Lorca did not try to spin an answer or a lie. There was no point. His role in the Federation's Starfleet was clearly over. "Guess that's that," he said, tapping his finger on the polished enamel surface of the table. He might yet get Discovery back somehow. The ship had brought him all the way back here and some part of him felt it still had a role to play in his destiny.

"How could you!" sobbed O'Malley. "Oh, god. Why is everyone I love a monster?" He buried his face in his hands.

It struck Lorca, the truth of what Lalana had said, because if anyone in the other universe was a master at saying things on two levels the way Lorca was, it was her. The love he had earned, it wasn't Lalana or Mischkelovitz or a second chance of living a dream with Michael Burnham. It was O'Malley.

Now it seemed he had lost that, too. He stared at O'Malley's shaking form and saw something pitiful and pathetic. He felt a pang of regret. Out of everyone on Discovery, only one person had actually loved him and not just the face he shared with the other Lorca.

"I want to go home," said O'Malley, voice a thin, plaintive wail. "Oh, Aeree!"

Lorca had always found physical contact an effective method of endearment. He reached over and put a hand on O'Malley's shoulder. He was surprised when O'Malley reciprocated the gesture, putting his own hand over Lorca's and squeezing. O'Malley's other hand wiped the tears from his face. His eyes were red and puffy against the splotchy freckles of his skin.

"I'm all right," said O'Malley, sniffling and waving Lorca away. "There's something else, something important. The reactor that powers this ship, it's destroying the network. You need to deactivate it."

"Not gonna happen," said Lorca. "I need that reactor to bring Georgiou's people to heel. Without it, I can't ensure order, and my people _need_ order. Too long have we lived under the chaos of Philippa Georgiou. The time has come for us to live in peace and prosperity under a single, strong order."

There was something manic in it. O'Malley almost suggested Lorca save the speech for the Terrans, but he could see how much Lorca believed it. It was the culmination of events in two universes.

"Gabriel, listen. The reactor is destroying the mycelial network. The network is seeded through reality or something like that. If it dies, everything dies." Maybe Burnham and Saru did not think Lorca deserved the chance to make the right choice where the fate of the universe was concerned, but O'Malley did.

This was a piss-poor explanation of the science but Lorca was familiar enough with the mycelial network to understand what O'Malley meant. "I need this reactor," he said. "Don't you worry, it'll hold. Destiny has led me here and it's not gonna desert me now."

"No, Gabriel, they're saying it won't hold. I don't know how long, but reality itself is at risk, and even if I never get back to our universe, I have to protect Aeree. And your universe is equally at stake."

"We'll figure out how long and deal with it then," said Lorca. It fell short of total agreement, but neither was it a dismissal. It was a patent "wait and see." Which, fair enough, no one on Discovery had told O'Malley how long the network had until it collapsed. It might be months, it might be years. Lorca was certainly not going to fail to do something which directly impacted his own survival. Whatever state he was in currently, it was not suicidal.

(There was, O'Malley had to admit, a nagging suspicion Lorca was not going to accept the network collapse scenario or would continue believing forever that the network would magically last however long he needed it to, but that was a problem O'Malley was prepared to work at solving. Discovery's current solution for solving the network blockage was something Stamets had come up with on the fly. There might be an alternate solution somewhere Lorca would readily agree to.)

"Anything else?"

O'Malley took a deep breath. "Yes. I think it's high time we stopped with the secrets, seeing as there's no reason to keep hiding any longer. My name is Macarius Aurelius O'Malley, I was born March 27th, 2215, to Andrew O'Malley and Emily Petrellovitz and I was recruited into Starfleet's Investigative Services division of Internal Security by my mentor, Janet Myers, who incidentally was also the person who helped extricate me from the QORYA case. I am a member of a specific subdivision of IS-2 for which there is no name, but I like to call us 'Damage Control.' Only a dozen people in Starfleet know what it is we do, and suffice to say, your Cornwell is not among them. Sorry, she's not your Cornwell, is she? She's not your anything.

"If she did know what it was I do, she never would have asked me to play any part in this. I'm one of the people Starfleet calls when Starfleet officers commit high crimes and my job is to reframe the narrative in a more explicable light so Starfleet can save face. Which isn't the reason I do it. I do it because I know firsthand that even people who do the worst things are still human and deserve to have their reasons understood."

"Is that what I am?" asked Lorca. "One of the worst people?"

"That depends. You know who I am. Tell me who you are. I'd like to understand."


	92. The Stories We Tell

A/N: This section runs concurrent to Michael Burnham finding and talking with Georgiou. To each their own.

Terribly sorry for the long delay. While I might share GRRM's affection for feast scenes, I certainly don't intend to make a habit of following his writing pace. I rewrote this chapter, oh, six, eight, twelve times, and there were about nine hundred details I needed to make sure were woven in, but in a way that still felt believably natural (to me at least; you can judge for yourself whether it all works or not).

One more note: I acknowledge this chapter runs a little long. (A little!?) I'm saying this only because I want to make clear when this is referenced in chapter 94, it's not explanation after the fact—rather, this has always been a part of that ridiculous plan I've mentioned a few times now. Anyway, here goes nothing...

* * *

For a long moment, Lorca did not respond. The request was an enormous one, especially in the middle of everything that was going on. It might also be impossible—it assumed that O'Malley was capable of understanding. Lorca scraped the surface of the table with his fingernail hard enough it left a mark. He was going to replace this accursed table first thing. "Awfully tall order. Maybe a little too tall for you."

Another time, another place, O'Malley might have rolled his eyes or even almost laughed, but between Larsson's death, Allan's death, and the truth of the Buran, he had no capacity for it. He clasped his hands, leaned forward, and said without the faintest shred of amusement, "Short of a Klingon attack, you have my full and undivided attention."

"It's not Klingons you need to worry about here," said Lorca. It sounded a lot like the setup for another joke. Facing the abyss, Lorca would go down laughing.

O'Malley remained humorless. "I don't know how much time we have, so stop stalling and start _talking_. We may not get another chance."

"Didn't you notice? I'm on the verge of victory here. We're winning. Soon as Georgiou's dead, we'll have all the time in _two_ universes." His smile made it seem like maybe Burnham was right and he did intend to conquer both, but if he ever attacked the Federation, he would lose Burnham. He had no intention of losing her again. Once was more than enough. "So let's table this chat. You can come watch me kill Georgiou."

"I didn't come here to watch you kill anyone. I know you think you're going to win everything, but nobody wins forever. You only win until the moment you don't."

Lorca's eyes narrowed. That sounded a lot like O'Malley was betting against him. "So, what, you came here for a story?"

"According to Lalana, they're the best gifts you can give," countered O'Malley, brightening for the faintest sliver of a moment before settling back into something verging on despondency. Lalana had gifted them all with a story about Lorca and the Buran but at the end of the day, that was all it had been. A story. "That's not why I came. Not entirely. John Allan laid bare all his cards. Why would he do that? The only reason I can see is that he didn't think you'd tell anyone. The only way to be sure someone doesn't tell..."

"Is to kill 'em," concluded Lorca. He reached into his pocket and pulled out Allan's tooth. "You really think the man I pulled this out of had any clue as to my destiny? He couldn't even see his own death."

O'Malley had not been present at the moment of Allan's disappearance, but he had heard about the sudden clamp of jaw as if Allan had activated a poison pill and was aware of Lalana's impromptu dental work on Allan's corpse. He held out his hand. "May I?"

Lorca closed his fingers around the tooth. "You may not."

"Why not? He used it. It's spent, isn't it?"

Lorca's face darkened. What were the chances this temporal failsafe could be used twice? In fact, what were the chances he was holding the device itself and not just an emergency trigger? Allan's body and handheld device disintegrated when he died. The idea that there was any sort of active technology left in his tooth suddenly seemed laughable.

Petrellovitz was going to be very unhappy. Sighing, Lorca dropped his fist down heavily onto the table and opened it. O'Malley took the tooth from Lorca's palm and said to it, "I'm sorry, John. You didn't deserve to die."

"He had to die," said Lorca.

"Did he?"

Lorca studied O'Malley's face carefully, reading the twitches of regret in O'Malley's expression, and asked, "You gonna cry again?"

"Would that be the worst thing?"

"It's a weakness," warned Lorca.

O'Malley's face hardened into a look of somber determination. "No, it's not," he said, offering the tooth back.

"It is in this universe," replied Lorca, plucking the tooth from O'Malley's fingers and slipping it back into his pocket. "Maybe in some future I did die, but seems fate has changed in my favor." He smirked for good measure. Instead of Allan watching him die, he had watched the light drain out of Allan's eyes. A direct and parallel reversal of fortune. Destiny in action.

"Or fate is trying to give you the chance to stop before it's too late."

There seemed to be a threat in there somewhere. Lorca leaned an arm on the table, a dark challenge in his eyes. "You come here to stop me?"

"Is that what you want me to do?" asked O'Malley desperately. "Do you want me to stop you, Gabriel?"

"As if you could."

O'Malley sat there, taking in this smugness and defiance, thinking that Lorca was the cockiest bastard he had ever met and it was right, that ancient saying: pride goeth before a fall. He might, armed with what he now knew, be able to stop Lorca, but to do so would mean somehow lessening the marvelous mess of secrets, contradictions, and hubris that made Lorca who he was, and that was not something O'Malley had any interest in doing. "Please, Gabriel. Allan's gone, Larsson's gone, I can't have it all be for nothing. I need this. I'm begging you."

"I don't owe you anything," said Lorca firmly.

"You owe it to yourself," said O'Malley.

"You want a confession," suggested Lorca. "Tell you I'm sorry and make it all right."

"No," said O'Malley. "I'm only interested in the truth."

"Tit for tat," said Lorca, amused. That little three-word motto of O'Malley's was more than mere affectation: it was the principle by which O'Malley lived his life. Whether accounting for hours Larsson spent on break or asking a life story in exchange for giving one, O'Malley was all about fair trades. _I'll show you mine, you show me yours._ Lorca glanced at the door to the throne room. Landry would alert him to any developments. "Three questions."

Three questions was all O'Malley needed. "What's the worst thing you've ever done? What's the best thing? What action or inaction do you most regret? Take your pick."

As O'Malley had done what seemed like (and in a very real sense was) lifetimes ago, Lorca chose the middle question.

"It was a banquet," began Lorca, "for a couple dozen promising captains and commanders to meet their new emperor. But like everything Georgiou does, it was also a test."

He could remember it vividly. The details came alive in his mind as he spoke.

* * *

The appetizer was sea snails. As Lorca chewed at the faintly rubbery texture, he tried to decide what it tasted like. There was something of an octopus or squid comparison to be made here, but the texture was a bit smoother and entirely more flavorful. Savory, maybe a touch of saltiness. Not like the sea urchin salad from the course before. That had tasted a bit too much like lettuce dressed in stagnant seawater. He put another slice of the snail in his mouth, clumsy with the supplied chopsticks, and then a third.

The emperor sat at the head of the table, resplendent in gold and white, armor glittering in the lights of the banquet hall. Her voice rang out over the room as she addressed the assembled officers. "Come, now, you have trouble sampling the bounty of the sea from our planet? What then will you make of the next course."

The fact was, most of the people around Lorca were having extreme difficulty eating any of it. Some were staring in dread at untouched plates. Others were managing, but not well. Very few, like Lorca, were taking to this task with any gusto. Georgiou scanned their faces, delighted at the grimaces of discomfort.

Lorca was seated halfway down the table. It was not a position of prestige. He needed to make his mark if he was going to get a seat further up towards the emperor where the important commanders were. He reached for his glass of wine and said in a voice that carried quite easily to the emperor's ears, "This is delicious."

"Gabriel Lorca, is it?"

There was a half-smile on his face at the sound of his own name. He inclined his head and raised the wine glass in Georgiou's direction. "I'd love to get the recipe." He took a quick swig of wine and went for the last piece of snail on his plate, abandoning his chopsticks and grabbing it with his fingers. Even if it made no real sense, he decided the word to describe the taste was _warm_.

Georgiou's smile was entirely calculating. "I'll see to it you do," she promised, and to be sure he was not bluffing, added, "Perhaps you would like more?"

"Sure," said Lorca, and plucked a piece of sea snail from his neighbor's plate. The woman sitting next to him could not decide if she was upset to have her own shortcomings highlighted in front of the emperor or relieved to have less on her plate. She decided on the latter and let him steal another piece without complaint before pulling her plate possessively closer lest the emperor think she needed the assistance.

"It really is good," Lorca assured her in a voice that did not carry.

"Just like escargot," the woman said to herself, picking up a piece.

"Blanchard, that's French, yeah?"

"My grandfather was French Canadian," Blanchard answered, which was an easy way of indicating her French roots were in name only and escargot was more of a talking point from her cultural heritage than a part of her own personal experience.

"Lorca is Spanish," said Lorca. "Though that's hardly the most interesting thing about my family." He recounted the history of his family's fortune cookie factory operation as a distraction, which seemed to help Blanchard clear her plate of the remaining snail. She was starting to look greenish.

As the next course arrived, gormagander dressed in some sort of sauce, Lorca noticed something else come into the room behind the last waiter. Its movements were furtive and feral as it darted beneath the far end of the table.

The plates of food lowered in near-perfect unison onto the table. Lorca used the occasion as an excuse to knock one of his chopsticks to the floor. The chopstick was a loss, but it gave him reason to lean sideways just enough to see under the table. A girl maybe eight years old was crawling along the floor. Lorca timed her progress and stretched his legs out under the table to block her path as he waited for a fresh pair of chopsticks and watched the other diners pick at their food.

He chanced another look under the table. The girl was glaring at him. He was obviously doing this intentionally. With a look of wild fury, she wrapped her arms around his leg and bit down on his calf. He felt the pinch of her teeth and the warm wetness of saliva spread through the fabric of his pants.

"Yeah, I agree," he said in response to something Blanchard had said, his eye twitching. The girl squirmed on Lorca's leg and bit at his kneecap. Keeping his attention seemingly focused on the plate of gormagander in front of him, Lorca reached into his pocket and pulled out a fortune cookie. He held it out under the table.

It worked. An unseen hand took the cookie and the mouth disengaged from his leg and found a new target. He heard a tiny spitting sound as the child bit into the paper and realized part of the cookie was not edible. He wondered what fortune it was.

An attendant approached the emperor and whispered something. Lorca saw the emperor's lips move in a firm and angry response: _Find her._ The attendant hastily withdrew.

Lorca considered ratting the girl out to the emperor. He had no idea what the emperor intended to do with the girl or who she was. There were so many mysteries where Georgiou was concerned. Merely being summoned to this table was both risk and honor. Until today, Lorca would not have guessed the emperor was a woman, so closely did she guard the details of her existence from the empire at large to cultivate an air of mystery that implied hidden dangers. Effective, but disconcerting when you removed the mystery and connected the dots between the emperor's often tactically incongruous actions and her identity.

The replacement chopsticks arrived and Lorca finally managed to sample one of the pieces of gormagander. The flavor was entirely enjoyable. Even if this was colloquially known as space whale, it tasted more like a flakily-delicate steak than seafood. There was palpable relief around him at this fact. It was somehow easier to eat something completely unknown in this instance than to bite down on an animal from their own planet not normally consumed in their own cultures.

As Lorca ate, he carefully dropped a few pieces of food into his non-dominant hand and offered them to the girl under the table. The enticement convinced her to disengage from his leg and crouch next to his chair. She pressed against his knee and took the scraps, initially with her fingers, but she seemed to dislike the sauce from the gormagander getting on her fingers and the next time an offering came down, she ate it directly off his hand. Lorca stifled a chuckle and wiped his fingers on his napkin.

The meal continued like this, Lorca secreting bits of food down to the child under the table for his own amusement, the officers around him struggling at Georgiou's banquet of horrors. The next course was whole Andorian redbat. Easy enough if you pretended it was some kind of bird. Then live worms considered a delicacy by a troublesome border species that had been clashing recently with the Terran fleet. Lorca found them squishy and mildly spicy, with rubbery skins and mushy innards. Most everyone else at the table seemed content to poke and stare at their plates.

Georgiou addressed the diners. "Come now, surely you are not intimidated? I am not intimidated by my enemies or their food. I will conquer them in all ways." She lifted a mass of wriggling worms on her chopsticks, tilted her head back, and dropped the wriggling worms into her mouth, slurping them down.

The other diners attempted to copy Georgiou's example. It was too much for Blanchard. She covered her mouth and stumbled away from the table, fighting the urge to retch.

Lorca kept his seat. The child pressed against his leg, not wanting to be spotted and have her little game of hide and seek ended. Two of Georgiou's guards came and hauled Blanchard to her feet.

At first Blanchard seemed to think this might be some form of assistance as she apologized for her sensitive stomach, sweating with embarrassment, but the guards' grips were too firm as they drew her towards the head of the table.

Georgiou stood, drawing a small, golden blade from her belt and running her finger along the flat of it. "I need the officers who serve me to be made of steel," she said. "Steel does not bend under _worms_. It slices them." With a sudden thrust, she sliced the blade across Blanchard's neck. Arterial spray splashed across Georgiou's armor and onto the table. The guards hauled Blanchard's lifeless body away.

People could not eat the worms fast enough after that.

The girl under the table tugged at Lorca's pants leg insistently. She wanted some of what he was eating. With no way to make clear that this was probably not a meal she wanted, Lorca acquiesced, dropping a worm down her way.

The little girl picked the worm up and pinched it in her fingers, watching the ends writhe in the air. She decided it was more a plaything than food and proceeded to pull it in half from both ends. Worm guts squirted through her fingers. She smeared her fingers on Lorca's pants. This was a little too much, really. Lorca's brow furrowed.

The emperor noticed Lorca's distraction and addressed him again. "Full already, commander?" she asked.

He quickly affected an air of amiable benevolence. "Just wonderin'. This empty seat here, seems a shame to waste the food. If you'd permit me, I'd like to add a guest to the table."

"What guest would that be?"

Lorca patted Blanchard's vacant seat. The girl stared up at him from the floor, obstinate. Lorca frowned down at her and, with all eyes on him, pushed his chair back slightly, reached under the table, and scooped the girl up so quickly that by the time she thought to struggle and squirm away she was already sitting in the chair beside him.

"Michael, you should be in bed," said Georgiou, her tone calmly familiar—yet for all the familiarity, there was a bite in there still. The emperor never failed to show her teeth.

Michael glanced at all the adult faces and answered in a way that felt dutifully subservient and entirely routine, "Yes, mother."

Three things struck Lorca. First, the voice was so small compared to the ferocity displayed under the table. Second, it was extremely unlikely Georgiou was Michael's biological mother owing to the difference in skin tone and likeness. Third, fate had just dropped an unprecedented opportunity into his lap to impress their new emperor and perhaps curry some favor that might translate into power and prestige down the line.

"Suppose she was just hungry," suggested Lorca. "Everyone sleeps better on a full stomach."

"Was that it? Were you hungry?" asked Georgiou. "Then eat."

Every time the emperor spoke, Michael seemed to shrink slightly. Lorca picked up his chopsticks, managed to grab a few worms, and brought them to his mouth. One of the worms wriggled free onto the table. He picked the straggler up with his fingers and added it to the rest, chewing and waiting for Michael to make some sort of move.

Michael reached for Blanchard's abandoned chopsticks and, with skill that far surpassed Lorca's, scooped up a full sampling of worms and slurped them into her mouth. She went for a second mouthful before the first was even fully chewed.

Lorca started laughing. He looked around at the other faces at the table, every one of them staring at him like he was mad. "Look at that! She's put all of you to shame."

* * *

"Michael Burnham?" asked O'Malley, reeling slightly.

"One and the same," confirmed Lorca.

O'Malley shook his head. "Unbelievable," he said, thinking there was another point of question here. He found himself suddenly wondering if Lorca's failure to save the Penfield had less to do with tactics and more to do with the fact in the universe Lorca came from, Blanchard was already dead—a coincidence that might be misconstrued as fate.

Lorca smirked, enjoying both the vacant look of surprise on O'Malley's face and the memory of meeting Michael the first time. "She was used to it, you see, all the weird food Georgiou liked to eat. Philippa called it 'the bounty of the universe.' You had to eat it if you were gonna conquer it."

As interesting as the anecdote was, Lorca was not being entirely clear in his answer. "So the best thing you ever did was..."

"I'm gettin' to that. After dinner..."

* * *

The vaguely gasoline aroma of the durian fruit served for dessert lingered in the air. Eating it had been a trial even for Lorca—his nostrils seemed to indicate the fruit in front of him was poison and his taste buds agreed—but he muddled through as well as anyone save Michael and the emperor herself. What Lorca and the other diners found unusual, Michael took in stride. It seemed these sorts of culinary tests were de rigueur in Georgiou's household.

As brave as Michael was with the menu, she was not a talkative companion. Lorca's attempts to initiate conversation resulted in him talking at her more than anything. Her responses came largely in the form of exaggerated nods or head shakes. He persistently kept at it, offering a lighthearted stream of mild encouragements and jokes designed to disarm and eventually she began to swing her legs under the table, proof positive his efforts were paying off in some way.

The whole time he was cognizant of Georgiou's eyes upon him, watching, calculating, judging. Now that the plates were clearing, he intended to make sure the ultimate judgment tipped in his favor. "You're up awfully late. Your mom still gonna read you a bedtime story?" Wide, curious eyes. "She does read you bedtime stories?" Michael shook her head. Lorca squinted at her in engaging mock horror. "No wonder you were runnin' around so late. You gotta have a bedtime story. Can't sleep without one. My mom told me a story every night."

The way his face twisted and danced with these statements enthralled her. She looked up at him with eager excitement at the prospect, and perhaps something else: _hope_.

At the head of the table, Georgiou rose from her seat. Her eyes were fixed on them and her intent clear. She beckoned to an attendant waiting off to the side. He had to spin this into success fast or the chance might disappear forever.

He leaned in close, his voice dropping into a low tone only Michael could hear. "I can tell you a story if you want. I know all the best ones. You'd like that, yeah? All you gotta do is grab my hand and don't let go. No matter what happens, don't let go. Got it?"

With those big brown eyes staring up at him, she nodded once, the biggest nod she could.

"Don't let go," he said one last time, then lifted his head to address the oncoming emperor. "Emperor! May I say what a remarkable conversationalist your daughter is."

Georgiou did not seem amused by the joke. "Come, Michael," she said.

Lorca twisted and scooted his chair aside to make room for Michael to depart, leaning his forearm on the edge of table so his hand was dangling in front of her. She looked up at him, fear in her eyes, and saw the promise still written on his face. In his eyes he was saying it a fourth time, because it was that important: _don't let go_.

Michael's fingers closed around his, squeezing tightly. Lorca feigned surprise. "All right, time for you to git. It's way past your bedtime." Her grip tightened. The officers around them dropped their conversations into low tones, torn between the urge to rubberneck and the desire to not seem like they were infringing upon the emperor's private life.

"Michael," said Georgiou in warning, head turning in faint threat.

Lorca shook his hand as if trying to shake Michael off, but she held fast. He smiled slightly. _Attagirl_. "You gonna let go?" Taken at face value, the question seemed an honest request, but Michael recognized it as both challenge and coded instruction, even if these concepts were somewhat beyond her years. Her gaze was level with determination.

"My daughter seems quite taken with you," noted Georgiou, idly stroking the hilt of the blade at her hip.

"Ah, you know how kids get when they find a new toy they like," said Lorca with a shrug. He saw a flicker of confusion on Georgiou's face. She did not know. "They just gotta have it or they pitch a fit. Not that Michael here's gonna end this fine meal with a tantrum." As he spoke, he shifted his attention back towards Michael, almost admonishing her. "It'd be entirely unbecoming, especially for a daughter of the emperor who's clearly inherited her mother's bravery and iron will—if that's not too forward an observation on my part, emperor."

Georgiou sniffed in a manner that indicated approval. As obvious as the flattery was, it was not entirely unwelcome.

There was also a hesitation in Georgiou because, upon further consideration, Michael was capable of throwing the most unfortunate tantrums. That was absolutely not how the emperor wished to be remembered by her guests. "If she were to tantrum, there would be consequences," Georgiou stated with yet another of those reptilian smiles that seemed to come so easily to her.

The reemergence of Georgiou's smile sent a small chill down Lorca's spine. This was treading on the edge of real danger. Time to go all in and see what fate had in store for his gambit. "I could escort her out if you like. Avoid a scene?" The last bit he delivered with a sympathetic wince and in a confidential whisper.

"Perhaps that would be best," mused Georgiou.

"Anything to be of service, emperor."

Out in the hallway, the attendant attempted to detach Michael from Lorca's arm. Lorca deferred the action with calm certitude and insisted upon a continuation of the escort all the way to Michael's room, applying a heavy measure of stubborn Southern charm and command bluster until the servant acquiesced. Michael, for her part, followed him with the docility of a lamb, even if her hand was more like a crab's pincer.

Michael's room was as marvelous a room as a child could wish but Lorca's first thought was that there was something sterile about it. An abundance of toys in pristine condition, an overly saccharine pink canopy bed encrusted with gilded crenellations, a fancy riding horse wrapped in what looked to be genuine horse leather and hair. It all combined to create a manufactured luxury indicating someone was trying much too hard. Children, Lorca had heard, could sense inauthenticity.

"You can let go," announced Lorca, and Michael complied. The attendant hovered, waiting for Lorca to exit. He lingered instead. "She have nightclothes or something?"

There was a whole pre-bed regimen. Pajamas, tooth brushing, a cup of warm milk. Seemed like it had come out of an instruction manual on how to rear children. No, he decided, it was more like it was based on an idealized version of parenthood from an old movie. Almost entirely artificial. He watched with arms crossed, silently bemoaning the discolored stain of dried worm guts on his pants courtesy of that little monster.

The attendant finally herded Michael towards the bed. Lorca swooped in and swept Michael up once more, depositing her on top of the bedspread. "Fetch me a padd, will you?" said Lorca. The attendant shifted uneasily. This had already gone much further than she had thought it would and she was beginning to think she had made a mistake. Only after Lorca offered stringent reassurance all would be well did the attendant comply. (Even if this reassurance was entirely a lie, it was what the attendant needed to hear. Perhaps Georgiou would be merciful. He hoped so. Anyone in the emperor's household who could be convinced to do as Lorca asked was a potential asset.)

For Michael, Lorca had an entirely different set of instructions. "Listen up. You gotta close your eyes and keep 'em closed. Open your eyes even a _tiny_ crack and the story stops. Got it?"

Michael nodded eagerly as she crawled beneath the covers. The attendant returned with the padd. It was easy enough to locate the title he was looking for and even the exact translation he wanted. Lorca waited expectantly until Michael's eyes squeezed shut. Then he began.

"Chapter one, A Floating Reef. In the year 1866 the whole maritime population of Europe and America was excited by an inexplicable phenomenon..."

The words came easily and with an engaging cadence reflecting a thorough knowledge of the material. He even easily interjected notes of explanation for words that might confuse Michael, like _cetacean_ , _phlegmatic_ , and _schooner_ , without interrupting the general flow of the story. When the dialogue began, he threw in voices for good measure. The captain of the Abraham Lincoln, for example, became a Scotsman. This delighted Michael so much she opened her eyes for a peek and Lorca stared at her in expectant warning until her eyes were shut again.

The first few chapters were not very long. Georgiou appeared during the fourth. Luckily, the demand for eyes to remain closed had succeeded in its aim of lulling Michael into a state of near-slumber, and as Lorca concluded the fourth chapter, it seemed possible at last to depart from the bedside without risking another bout of wakefulness on the part of his primary audience.

There was no immediate indicator as to whether or not his decision to undertake this rather unconventional course of action had been a good or a bad one. Stepping into the hall with Georgiou, Lorca found her entirely inscrutable and suspected the emperor herself had yet to make up her mind.

"You did not return to my table," was her opening accusation. She stood with feet apart and her hands on her hips, her chin jutting up at him with barely-restrained contempt for his actions.

"Apologies, your highness."

"I did not bring you here to serve my daughter," was the next.

"No," said Lorca in agreement, and someone lesser would have left it at that or begged forgiveness for seizing such an indulgence, but not him. "You brought me here because you need a commander who won't just sit at your table and swallow what he's fed. You need someone who'll take initiative and anticipate your needs. More than that, someone who's gonna put your needs first. Everyone who stayed and sat at that table probably only wanted something for themselves, not the good of the Empire. Sycophants all. You don't need sycophants. You need tactical commanders who can apply lateral thinking and adjust to whatever fate throws their way."

"You presume to tell me what I need?"

"In the hopes that I can prove myself the commander you're looking for? Yes, because if I'm right, then I am."

Georgiou's eyes narrowed and the corner of her mouth pulled upwards. "You are very bold, Gabriel Lorca." He was not nearly as amusing as he thought he was, but he was that.

"Fortune favors the bold."

Georgiou tapped her fingers against her belt. She drew her dagger with such speed, he might not have been able to dodge the strike if her intention had been to kill him. The blade pressed against his cheek and drew a single drop of blood at its tip. She traced downward with minimal pressure, the drop turning into a thin line no bigger than a strand of hair.

She resheathed her dagger and reached up, running a finger along the line of blood. It turned into a streak of sanguine finger paint. "We shall see if you are sufficient to the task of serving me." She brought the tip of her finger to her mouth and flicked her tongue against it. This time, her smile was intended for him completely.

He repeated his earlier sentiment with casual confidence. "However I can be of service, emperor."

* * *

"The best thing I ever did," concluded Lorca, "was read Michael a story. Because of that, Philippa made me her right-hand man, and that position that made everything I've done today possible. The salvation of the Empire. All because of _Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea_."

In another universe, Amanda Grayson had given Burnham an entirely different story, _Alice in Wonderland_. Lorca gave a small snort of amusement. Those two disparate stories, and the people who told them, had given rise to a pair of Michael Burnhams who were like night and day.

"I found out later how Pippa got herself a daughter. She didn't have any blood relatives. Killed 'em all so they wouldn't pose a threat. Her vanity, however, insisted upon the creation of an enduring legacy, and she always had a thing for Michael's mother. Unfortunately, Michael's mother didn't have a thing for her. First chance Pippa got, she offed the Burnhams and took Michael for herself. Instant heir and indemnity: adopted means no birthright, position entirely dependent on Georgiou's goodwill." Goodwill that, when Michael made a choice for herself, had been imperiled and driven Michael to move up the timetable of her inheritance.

As O'Malley parsed this wealth of information, Lorca considered it himself. As anyone who had ever been a target of Georgiou's "affections" well knew, the mere suggestion she possessed any goodwill was entirely laughable.

There was more to the memory of that evening, more that had happened, but it fell well outside the purview of O'Malley's inquiry.

Of course, once you were remembering something, it was hard to stop, and though Lorca did not speak it, the memory continued playing out in his head.

* * *

When he finally made it back to the suite hours later, bedraggled, with a shuffling gait and gaunt look in his eyes, Benford was waiting for him outside. They had come up in the service together, enlisted at the same time, and were presently serving under the same command. There was a semi-formal pact between them. While Benford was a perfectly decent officer, he did not excel the way Lorca did and held a lower rank. So long as Lorca kept pulling Benford along right behind, he could count on Benford to always have his back.

(Already Benford had saved Lorca once from an assassination attempt by a jealous rival. It seemed proof of Lorca's little conceit that loyalty was potentially better found in the absence of fear than in its presence.)

Last night had been one of those rare exceptions to their protective arrangement. Benford did not merit an invitation to dine at the emperor's table and had come onboard purely in the role of personal guard, the likes of which were not allowed at the banquet. All night long, Benford had waited for news as to what had become of Gabriel Lorca, wondering what would happen if, like Blanchard, Lorca never returned from dinner at all. "Where the hell have you been? I was starting to think you were dead!"

"Guess not," said Lorca. In any other tone of voice, it would have sounded like a joke. Instead, it was a resignation.

Benford had a dozen questions. "What the hell happened? Where were you? I heard you left with some kid. What about the plan? What about..."

"Jack, stop," said Lorca after moment. "Can I just...?" He raised a hand weakly towards the door. He wanted a shower but would settle for collapsing into bed at this point.

Benford crossed his arms. Lorca looked terrible, but he had caused Benford an entire night of worry that was not easily forgotten or forgiven. "Not until you tell me our status."

Lorca swallowed against the knot in his throat. "We're in."

"In? As in, _in?_ " The worry on Benford's face melted away. A kernel of enthusiasm appeared.

"Yep."

"So that's what you were up to all night? You horndog!" laughed Benford, clapping Lorca on the back. Benford was too swept up in imagining their bright futures to notice the way Lorca winced at the contact. Aside from that one opening stroke, Georgiou had declared Lorca's face "too pretty to mar, not when it should be on display at my side." Lucky for her, the human body was nothing if not a canvas of skin, most of it hidden beneath uniforms and armor where no one else would see.

Lorca tried not to take Benford's happiness as the additional slap in the face it felt like. "That's what I was doing. Securing the emperor's favor. And I did. Give it some time, but I guarantee you, we are gonna get our own commands. Our own way."

"You mean your way," said Benford, intending it as a compliment, a broad grin plastered on his face.

"Yeah," said Lorca rather lamely, leaving Benford in the hall.

As the door closed, Lorca reached around and tried to touch the spot near the middle of his back that had borne the brunt of Georgiou's test of strength and loyalty. He was too stiff to manage it. He grimaced at the sensation of fabric on raw skin as he removed his shirt and twisted around for a look in the mirror.

The welt was red and ugly, a sharp triangle that completely betrayed its origin: a handheld agonizer. Georgiou had done a perfect job of putting it in a spot he could not easily reach. Unless he sought someone else's help, the wound was going to scar. Lorca closed his eyes and inhaled deeply. This room had no windows and thus no stars.

It did have one comfort. A handful of fortune cookies sat on the table beside the door, dropped there when Lorca had arrived the day before. He hesitated a moment before taking one.

"Be tactful, but overlook not your own opportunities," it read.

It felt like a reassurance. He sighed faintly at the bit of paper, glad fate still seemed to be on his side, because he wanted to believe this was an auspicious event—he needed to believe it—and so that was the story he was telling himself. A story about how he, Gabriel Lorca, had played the emperor into fulfilling his desires, not the other way around.

This had not broken him. He was stronger than it and he was going to spin a miracle out of all the blood and bruises and agony. Something real and tangible: a legacy equal to the stars.

Let Georgiou have the frivolous vanity that was an heir. Thrones were not inherited in the Terran Empire. They were seized by those who had the strength to take them.

* * *

There was a grimace of distaste on Lorca's face. He had fallen into another small silence that O'Malley could only wonder at. There were still layers of secrets at play, but they were now at the level where the secrets were ones Lorca wanted to keep from himself.

For a moment, O'Malley thought Lorca was entirely lost in memory and needed to be pulled out, but Lorca drew himself free of the moment and resumed without prompting.

"Anyway, Georgiou pulled me into her inner circle and made me chief strategist. I don't have to tell you how much I excelled at that." The mere act of boasting restored Lorca to some level of confidence and pride because in both universes he had deftly proven himself equal to any tactical situation. Forward-thinking, anticipatory, adaptive. "I made myself indispensable. Georgiou's never been good at tactics. Always falls for traps. Same as in your universe."

O'Malley suppressed a shudder. There was a cruelty in speaking ill of a captain as highly-decorated and respected as Starfleet's Captain Georgiou, but Lorca was almost gleeful at the opportunity. His hatred of Georgiou ran deep and colored his impressions of both versions of her.

"She even fell for a little trap of mine. See, she loved Michael, in her own way, and all I had to do was put a whisper in her head that Michael ought to have a father figure. It's important to a girl's development. Who better than the man with the bedtime stories? I even suggested we call it an adoption. After that, Philippa couldn't kill me. Not without upsetting Michael. And Michael, well, she wasn't a sweet child, but she had her moments, and she _loved_ those stories."

O'Malley suddenly jerked upright like an alert rabbit, eyes wide. Lorca shot him a look demanding explanation. "Nothing, please continue," said O'Malley, waving a hand dismissively and looking away sheepishly.

"What," said Lorca sharply.

Reluctantly, O'Malley answered, "It's just, that song I don't hate. _Sweet Child of Mine_ by... Actually, I don't know who it's by."

Lorca stared, frowned, and tried to decide exactly how much of O'Malley's head he should bite off. "It's _Sweet Child O' Mine_ by Guns N' Roses," corrected Lorca scathingly, emphasis on the "O" because, _really_.

"Do you have it in this world, too? Maybe this place really isn't all bad," said O'Malley hopefully.

"Your brother's right, you are an idiot."

"Then I guess I'm _your_ idiot," said O'Malley dryly, which made Lorca smirk.

"You really are hopelessly infatuated with me, aren't you. What's your wife gonna think?"

The flush of red on O'Malley's freckles was not a denial. He quickly focused back to the subject at hand. "So you're a chief strategist who reads bedtime stories."

"Not just stories," clarified Lorca. "History, too. Marathon, the Eugenics Wars, the Annihilation of Xindus. The Twelve Caesars." The succession of Roman emperors had offered Michael the germ of an idea and also served as a template for her to aspire to. Heirs could be a threat just as much as a legacy. Often they were both. "Small wonder she preferred me to Pippa. I gave her universes and dreams. Pippa only ever cared about appearances. No substance, flashy to a fault. Gauche."

Lorca's distaste for Georgiou's ostentatiousness was written all over his face. He saw Georgiou as fundamentally flawed in this regard. True, some people might call him a showman given his ability to drum up a dramatic moment for effect, but he abhorred any comparison between himself and Georgiou. _His_ machinations were anything but empty pageantry. Whether brutally direct or verging on subtle through the employ of quiet manipulations, his sweeping moments were always predicated on something substantive.

The distaste softened into a fonder recollection. "I wish you could've met Michael. She was..." Lorca sighed almost happily. "Impossible. I took that little girl and I shaped her into a woman like no other. In every way. And I was justly rewarded for my efforts. My god, she was beautiful. And she was all mine."

The reaction this time was less the alarm of a rabbit and more a slow, horrified dawning. "Tell me you didn't," said O'Malley, face draining of color.

"Like you wouldn't. Pretty young thing throwing herself at you?" replied Lorca, unphased to the point of amused satisfaction.

O'Malley exploded with disbelief. "You once suggested _I_ should adopt. _What the actual hell is wrong with you!_ "

This was not the reaction Lorca had expected. He realized he had left a detail out. "She was grown," he offered, as if that excused it.

O'Malley threw his hands up, mouth open in shock, because while that did slightly lessen the apparent awfulness, it did not address the totality of O'Malley's upset. The indignity on his face suggested that, while the thought might cross his mind because he was only human, he absolutely, absolutely would not, and certainly not in this specific circumstance. "She was your—your—"

"Back up. I didn't 'adopt' Michael 'cause I wanted to. I _needed_ to. Let me explain a few things about the Terran Empire. The women here are aggressive. The men are aggressive. Everyone here is aggressive. They'd put your Aeree to shame, Mac. 'Cause people don't just drink blood in this universe. They _bathe_ in it.

"You wanna know why Georgiou likes holding meetings in person? So when she hears something she don't like, she can kill the messenger. I needed to give her a reason to think twice before coming for my head. _That's_ why I needed Michael. I never wanted kids. I just wanted to keep my head attached to my shoulders."

The logic (and the firmly authoritarian tone in which it was delivered) seemed to alleviate some of O'Malley's concerns, but not all. Lorca continued, "Besides, wasn't like I forced her. Michael always knew what she wanted. She and Burnham have that in common. Once they get something in their heads, they gotta see it through." It was the core trait that made it feel like Burnham could eventually be his Michael returned to him, or, at the very least, serve as a living memorial to the aspirations he and Michael had shared and see their work through to completion.

Lorca smiled in reminiscence again as he recalled exactly how Michael had made her intentions clear and how immensely satisfying it had been. The flattery of a younger woman's affections was enduring and undeniable. "Honestly, if she'd been so inclined, she would've climbed into Pippa's bed instead. Which, as I'm sure you've surmised, was her intent from the get-go: rule with a pretty young thing at her side, the spitting image of her dead lover." He snorted. "I wish I'd been there when Pippa realized I beat her to the punch. Can you imagine her face?" He started laughing. "That was the best part. Deconstructing the emperor's pretend 'family.' I took the one thing that mattered to Georgiou and made it mine. And together, Michael and I came up with the most beautiful plan..."

* * *

They found her on a supply run to a research colony that had gone suddenly dark. "I killed them all," was her only explanation for the eighteen bodies she left behind, but the truth was she had done far more than that. She had also mutilated the bodies beyond recognition and destroyed every shred of the colony's research, none of which had ever been published. About the only thing left in the colony's computer was the personnel roster.

When word reached Emperor Georgiou of a teenage girl found alone in the bloody aftermath of an eighteen-person massacre, it piqued her interest. Young girls like that were exactly the sort whose destiny Georgiou enjoyed shaping. She summoned the girl to the palace. Michael and Lorca were there when the girl arrived. Georgiou thought meeting this girl might serve as some sort of inspirational lesson for her adopted daughter.

The girl's name was Emellia Petrellovitz. She was fifteen, two and a half years older than Michael, but where Michael was quickly sprouting into a gracefully lithe, swanlike athleticism, Petrellovitz seemed to have topped out her height and nervously shaken off any curves that might have provided her with anything akin to a burgeoning female form. As a result, the two girls were almost the same size, and the scant difference in their height would doubtless be resolved within a year or two in Michael's favor.

Georgiou took one look at the twitching, scarred thing standing in front of them with those wildly mismatched eyes seeming to stare right through them all and decided there was nothing _pretty_ about Petrellovitz. This was no diamond. It was uncompressed coal. Georgiou's lip curled into a small sneer of distaste.

Whether you were good at what you did was almost immaterial where the emperor was concerned. It was more important that you were beautiful while you did it. So Lorca, so Michael, and so everyone the emperor called part of her inner circle or appointed into positions of power. There were so very many young, pretty female captains who had benefitted from Georgiou's preferences. This ugly, twitching thing would not be one of them.

(Honestly, Lorca minded this predilection of Georgiou's only a little. It did make for a very nice view, and any less-attractive but highly-competent officers passed over by Georgiou stood a decent chance of making their way to Lorca's command. It was something of a win-win for him personally.)

Michael looked at Petrellovitz and saw something else entirely: a map of scars that told a story. She _loved_ stories. Her eyes lit up and she ran forward and grabbed the other girl's hand. "Did you really kill eighteen people?"

There was a shudder from Petrellovitz at the physical contact and she jerked her arm back as if Michael's hand were an agonizer, of which there was no doubt the older girl had firsthand experience. "Careful, Michael," warned Lorca. This wasn't a child, it was a wild animal.

Michael only laughed. "Come see my room and tell me everything. Do you like chocolate strawberries? They're the best."

There was a flicker in those mismatched eyes. "Strawberries?" The word was slow, hesitant, spoken with an awareness of the concept of strawberries, but without any experience of them. A girl who had heard of strawberries but never tasted one. Michael dragged Petrellovitz away with the enthusiasm of someone who had found a wonderful new toy to play with.

"She'll get tired of her after a few weeks," offered Lorca, entirely unconvincingly.

"She did not get tired of you," noted Georgiou in a tone that was both grim and amused.

Michael did not get tired of Petrellovitz. For all her many faults and foibles, Petrellovitz was extremely smart and Michael liked that, even if she did not always understand the more technical aspects of Petrellovitz's scientific interests, like the relationship of space and time.

Several times Georgiou attempted to discourage the friendship, but Michael was cognizant of her own ability to manipulate Georgiou by this point and got her way in the end with one condition: that Georgiou never set eyes on Petrellovitz's unfortunate face ever again. From that point forward, Petrellovitz lived in the shadows surrounding Michael, lurking at the periphery, a ghost in the palace walls.

A ghost, it turned out, in the machine, too, because there was nothing Petrellovitz loved doing quite so much as delving into the palace systems during those long hours when Michael was otherwise occupied. Many of the things she dug up she shared with Michael.

Things like secret experiments being conducted at the emperor's behest into biological weapons. Weapons that could make a human pop like a balloon or wither away like an autumn leaf on a tree.

Things like the Defiant files, a set of classified documents pertaining to the incursion of a ship from another universe that enthralled both girls with the possibilities this multiverse presented.

Things like the truth about Michael's parents and how they died at Georgiou's hands for the sole crime of a woman's failure to return Georgiou's affections.

Lorca marveled at the depths of Petrellovitz's brilliance and simultaneous ineptitude as he talked Michael down from her bloodlust in the wake of this revelation. "You gonna sacrifice yourself 'cause Pippa killed your momma? _Think_ , Michael. You're better than that. Throwing your life away isn't getting revenge. And this"—he gestured at the wealth of imperial palatial abundance around them—" _this_ is how you get revenge. You earn this."

She found another way to get revenge on Georgiou in that moment. That was the beginning of the real end where they both were concerned.

He subsequently decided it might be a good idea to put some distance between Michael and Petrellovitz. As potent an asset as Petrellovitz was, Michael was a hotheaded nineteen-year-old and Petrellovitz was an unpredictable trigger.

Lucky for them all, there was a shiny new ship just coming off the assembly line called the Buran and it had Lorca's name written all over it. (Benford had taken a small cruiser called the _Agamemnon_ years back and was posted on routine patrols, a banal if satisfying existence. Lorca had held out for something grander for himself.)

Georgiou was more than happy to see Petrellovitz gone from the palace, but the distance did not diminish the girls' friendship. The Buran's communications logs proved that. Georgiou confessed her dismay at the continuing correspondence.

"Why don't you give Michael a command? That'll keep her distracted," suggested Lorca.

Sentimentally, Georgiou granted Michael her own old ship, the Shenzhou. She intended it as a heartfelt gesture which was marred only slightly by the knowledge it was Michael's mother's refusal to join the Shenzhou crew in favor of starting a family that had ultimately spelled her demise.

"Use that," was Lorca's mild encouragement when Michael privately expressed her rage at this turn of events. The fortune inside the cookie he handed her read, "New resources will soon become available to you."

"See?" he said. "It's fate."

"Destiny," confirmed Michael, a glimmer in her eyes as she studied the little bit of paper. This ship, with its tragic role in her past, became the launching point from which she lived up to Lorca's expectation that she earn her revenge. As captain of the Shenzhou, she proved her mettle against the enemies of the Empire and built up a reputation for fearlessness and inventiveness that made Georgiou unwittingly proud. To her, Michael's successes were the result of her parenting and mentorship. Michael and Lorca were more than happy for Georgiou to believe this.

The truth about Michael's parents, her hatred for Georgiou, the Defiant files, her relationship with Lorca—these were Captain Michael Burnham's secrets, and these secrets culminated in Michael's grand plan. Though Lorca dismissed the Defiant files as mere folly, Michael and Petrellovitz never forgot them, and when Petrellovitz realized Stamets' mycelial research could bridge the barrier between the worlds, Michael put the pieces together in a way that was charmingly inventive. It felt like everything was finally falling into place. Lorca's own desire to overthrow Georgiou had found the perfect vessel in Michael.

Except Petrellovitz stole a large quantity of spores right out from under Stamets' nose, infuriating him, so when Lorca and Michael joined Petrellovitz at a research laboratory on Priors World—where the abundance of ion storms in the area made theoretically possible the most miraculous thing—it did not go as planned.

"I mean, you say the math checks out," said Lorca to Petrellovitz, sounding entirely doubtful as to the value of this assertion.

"It does," Petrellovitz confirmed, wondering where the objection lay.

Lorca shrugged and frowned. "Which is great, but theories don't depose emperors."

Petrellovitz scowled. "Math is everything," she began, prepared to launch a rousing defense of the importance of math and how theories had, in fact, deposed emperors, but Michael stopped her.

"We're here to make theory into reality," she clarified.

"So, what, you gonna beam something there and back again?"

"Someone," said Michael, and smirked. "Me."

The ensuing argument was not one Lorca won because Michael, being so impossible, always got her way in the end, and she and Petrellovitz seemed to have anticipated Lorca's every objection. How would she get back? "The mycelial network extends through both universes," said Petrellovitz, "so this mobile transporter unit will be sent with Michael inside it, and when she has set it up on the other end, we'll have a way to beam back and forth."

Where would she end up? How to ensure she did not beam into space, solid matter, or a star?

"The mycelial network threads into spaces where transport is possible. We can tell the shape of the destination by the shape of the network, and we know from the Defiant files that the topography of the other universe mirrors our own. I have already mapped their version of Priors World as the destination. It's simply a matter of changing one dimensional coordinate."

How to know this system even worked?

"I have tested it with local transport within this facility and sent objects and life forms through to the other side, though without a facility on the other side, I am unable to retrieve them. But there is no reason to think they have failed to materialize on the other end the same as they did within this universe."

That did not exactly inspire confidence.

"That's why we're sending me inside this transporter," said Michael, putting a hand on the free-standing, bullet-shaped unit that would serve as the means of the return journey. It was big enough for a person to stand inside, but small enough to sit inside the main mycelial chamber.

"Send someone else," said Lorca. "Someone expendable." (In the back of his mind, he was thinking they ought to send Petra as the guinea pig.)

"You're not here to give orders, Gabriel," said Michael impertinently. "You're here to witness as I become the first person to journey to that universe and back again."

He had to smile at that because Michael and Petrellovitz were very convincing together. He was more than a little proud of them both, in awe of the fact they were about to do the seemingly impossible and fulfill some grand destiny that would cement their collective place in history.

"A ship would be better," said Petrellovitz, "but this will do for now."

A ship outfitted with this technology would have a tactical advantage like no other. "All right," said Lorca.

There was something magical in the swirl of blue particles in the larger transport chamber. Michael looked so cocky, so confident as she disappeared in front of them, ready to begin this adventure into another world with a step so bold and brave it was unmistakably her.

"And now we wait," said Petrellovitz.

"How long?"

"A few minutes. It will take time to connect, configure, and calibrate the remote transport unit."

They waited. And waited. "This is taking too long," said Lorca, and he could see from Petrellovitz's expression she was thinking the same.

"I'll beam you over."

"Oh, no, you're next," Lorca informed her. His communicator beeped and he flipped it open.

It was the Buran. Levy was on the other end of the line. "Captain, the Charon—!"

A message filtered over the communicator, secondhand from the Buran's bridge.

"Gabriel Lorca," came the voice, cold and chilling to the bone. "You deceitful traitor. Did you really think you could plot against me? With my own daughter?"

"And steal my spores!" came a second voice, smaller and almost comically squeaky in comparison to Georgiou.

"Beam me up," said Lorca quickly.

He could hear the fierce determination in Levy's voice. "Sir, there's an ion storm. I can't get a transporter lock." She was calm under pressure. She'd make a good captain someday.

"Get in the chamber, I'll beam you over," said Petrellovitz. At the end of the day, she was a chief science officer on the Buran, those were her crewmates up there, and she had mentioned using the transporter successfully within the confines of their own universe, so he had no reason to doubt her and no time to consider any other course of action.

The swirl of blue particles was magical and disorienting and he momentarily lost the sensation of gravity as he was transported in a cloud of swirling lights that made him squeeze his eyes shut against the brightness.

He realized, as he opened his eyes and the last flickers of mycelium spores gave way to darkness, that Petrellovitz had not changed the target coordinates to the Buran. Very probably she had never intended to.

He was lying on his side on an uneven, rocky surface. When he inhaled, ashy dust from the ground filtered into his lungs and made him cough. The air was cool, dry, and smelled vaguely sulfuric. He sat up, feeling the subterranean chill of the ground beneath his fingers. "Michael?" His voice echoed.

Priors World was known for its abundance of large, naturally-occurring volcanic chambers. They were ideal places for storing and researching the sorts of hazardous materials that required isolation from the outside world or, as in Petrellovitz's case, for any sort of research that required secrecy. (Secrecy was very important when the research you were engaged in was stolen.) From the smell in the air and the echo, this was one such chamber not in active use.

Lorca rolled to his feet as his eyes adjusted. There was a blue glow emanating from behind him. He drew his phaser and instinctively performed a tactical sweep as he turned, the red light of the phaser offering a gently contrasting highlight to the blue. The mobile transporter unit was lying at an angle, its entry hatch pinned against an outcropping of magma rock, a cascade of blue mycelium spores spilling out across the ground. "Michael!"

No answer. Lorca picked a pathway over to the unit using his phaser sight, the little red dot dancing across the ground. Except for the spilled spores, the transporter itself looked intact. Michael had probably just hit her head and fallen unconscious inside upon landing or been unable to get the chamber open and passed out after screaming angrily for too long. Lorca gave the transporter a push and it rolled off the outcrop of rock onto the ground with the hatch facing upward.

He smiled at the thought she was going to be so mad at herself for needing him to come help rescue her. He enjoyed these rare moments when she needed rescuing. The dot of his phaser sight refracted across the surface of the transparent aluminum window and illuminated the chamber inside.

* * *

"She was..."

Lorca's eyes were fixed upon the center of the table, right at the spot where Georgiou had left the head of that sex slave for him to find, but those green eyes were not the vision in his mind right now. It was Michael, her body misshapen and flayed out into a spiral like it had unraveled from within, guts and bones and everything sticking out wrong. His hands were clasped in his lap and his foot was tapping in an idle repetition that shook up through to his shoulder.

He swallowed, wincing as he did. "Twisted," he managed in a raspy almost-whisper.

O'Malley studied Lorca carefully. "I'm sorry."

"For what," Lorca said darkly, his leg stilling. "You didn't do it. It was Hawking radiation." The same fate as had befallen the Glenn.

That was the worst part somehow. Michael had, in the end, done it to herself. Neither he nor Petrellovitz, had she been so inclined, had ever had any chance of talking Michael out of this adventure because Michael wanted to be the grand explorer of an unknown realm just like Captain Nemo in the depths of the sea.

"I'm sorry for your loss, and... I'm sorry that I ever suggested you didn't have anyone you loved. You were right. I didn't know you."

Lorca's lip twitched and his jaw tightened. His eyes shifted towards O'Malley, filled with accusation. "And you think you know me now?"

Actually, thought O'Malley, he had known Lorca the moment they met, but he kept this fact to himself and maintained a look of calm, level patience. It was an expression anyone who had ever been subject to one of O'Malley "interrogations" would recognize. O'Malley could remove all judgment of another person when he wanted to and it was entirely sincere when he did.

His provocation unanswered, Lorca glanced away and resumed. "I got out of there eventually. First I had to _scrape_ Michael out of the transporter." The word was as visceral to speak as it was to hear. Lorca shuddered. "Something about that Hawking radiation fucks up biological material more than mechanics, so the transporter was operational, but it wouldn't go to the coordinates they programmed into it. Still don't know why, but I think Georgiou'd gotten hold of Petra by then, so the lab she was working out of was probably gone. The spores were dying, too. I managed to set the coordinates to the surface. Safest thing I could think of. Better than dying in some hole, anyway."

* * *

I could've died regardless—beamed into the void of space or something—but I didn't. Fate had other plans. Fresh air and sunshine and I found out then and there how bright sunshine could be in your universe. It burned. _Searing_ pain.

First thing I needed was information. At the first sign of civilization, I spun a little yarn about being stranded after a domestic squabble gone wrong, got myself in front of a computer terminal, and damn if people weren't bending over backwards to help me out. Almost made it too easy.

Initially my only thought was getting back. I looked for Petra. Couldn't find her, 'cause she's Mischka in your universe. Then Stamets. Then Michael. Then me. Captain of the Buran. Some things never change, I guess.

My best shot at getting home was Stamets, but I couldn't get to him and his research without exposing my identity. I needed resources, authorization, access to a ship, rank in your Starfleet, none of which I could easily get with the other me running around.

I don't need to tell you how awful and terrible I found your universe. It was like every single thing that could be wrong _was_. It was amazing, though, how easy people were to trick and how gullible. I got off Priors World and found a little station where people didn't ask too many questions and the Federation was less a government and more an abstract suggestion. Good base of operations if you want to remain anonymous. I soon had half that station eating out the palm of my hand, and I was gonna replace Maras—the local crime lord—but then the war broke out and right, smack dab in the middle of it all was Burnham. And, it turned out, your sister.

Fate was showing me the way.

I knew Klingon ships 'cause I'd been working with the rebels here. It's amazing how similar our universes can be. Got aboard a cruiser, took the crew by surprise, figured out where the other me was patrolling, and then it was just a matter of setting the right bait.

You know something really strange? He and I had the same damn access codes. All I had to do was get in comm range of the Buran and it was over. I knew every little thing he was gonna do before he did it. Four days I led that man on a wild goose chase while I read his personal logs. Fifth day, I blew him up. Set the Buran's systems to overload and forced the ship to self-destruct and it looked like he did it himself. Set the Klingon ship to self-destruct, too, and the whole thing looked like a battle gone bad.

(Lorca paused a moment in thought. Destroying the USS Buran had been necessary and finding out that the ISS Buran had suffered a similar fate seemed only to confirm the rightness of his actions, but now that he knew the people from the other universe a little better, he had some misgivings. If only things had been different. If only he had somehow switched places with the other Lorca directly, maybe the loss of the USS Buran could have been avoided.)

So that's how I took his place. Grabbed a defunct data core from the Klingon ship and pretended I was trying to bring back cloaking secrets worth the destruction of my own vessel. I had Starfleet eating out the palm of my hand. Cornwell especially. After reading all your Lorca's personal logs, she was an easy mark. The only one who could've stopped me was Lalana. And she didn't. Knew I was lying the whole time and helped me every step of the way. God, she is... She's something else. Crazy, but useful.

I think... Well, it doesn't matter now. Important thing is, I got them to give me Discovery. You should've heard the speech I gave. I learned enough about your Federation to know exactly what to say. Science, unity, diversity, collaboration. It was like selling water in a drought. They gave me Mischka, they gave me Stamets, and I had everything I needed.

Except... I knew she wasn't my Michael, but... I kept waiting for Starfleet to acknowledge the truth of what Commander Burnham had done at the Binaries, accept the fact she'd been right and release her, and they didn't. I couldn't bear to see my girl in a cage. I went and got her out.

She was _really_ something else. Minute I set eyes on her, I just... It's true, what Lalana says. When the person you love most is gone, it's worth everything just to be able to see their face. I wouldn't trade that for the world.

Thing is, Stamets wasn't quite so far along in his research as Petra, so Discovery wasn't ready or capable of getting me where I needed to go. I figured, while I was in charge, may as well make the best of it, help out with your little war. Your Federation's a bunch of babies when it comes to fighting and killing. I admit, your Lorca was good, but I'm better, and we almost had them. We really did.

I wish I could've done that for you. Won your little war. Instead, here we are.

* * *

"So, Mac, tell me. Was it everything you imagined? Did you get what you wanted?"

O'Malley's head tilted. "Did you?"

"I will once Georgiou's dead," said Lorca. "Speaking of, I think I gotta go put the unholy fear of god into my people, 'cause this is taking way too long. I suppose now you've got what you came for, you're gonna try and scurry back to Discovery?"

The look on O'Malley's face was familiar because it was the exact same way Lorca's followers in this universe looked at him: with fervent admiration. "You can't get rid of me that easily," said O'Malley.

Lorca smiled. He picked up the little paper fortune from the table. _Seek to identify in yourself what you love in others._ If O'Malley could sit there, listen to all of that, and still find it in him to follow Lorca, maybe in time, the rest of Discovery's crew would, too.


	93. Smoke and Mirrors

A/N: The dialogue in the last scene of this chapter is screen-accurate, but the exact visual details are likely not because using CBS All Access is like pulling teeth out with lit matches and I was tired of skipping back and forth in the episode, so I just sort of winged it from memory. Important thing is, the facts are there!

* * *

Not for the first time in her life, Cadet Sylvia Tilly found herself an unwanted presence in the room.

There were half a dozen engineers and armory officers clustered around the torpedo. Practical engineers, not theoretical like Tilly; people with experience fabricating and jury-rigging components. Tilly hovered around them, trying to double-check everything against her simulated models of the mycelial explosion that would destroy the Charon's reactor and free the network. "The spore containment needs to maintain integrity up to forty-two thousand psi so the spores aren't incinerated by the torpedo blast before they reach the point of critical reaction," she said.

"We have the specs right here," Kumar said in response, tapping the console next to him without looking up from the work he was doing. Though the admonishment was light, Tilly could hear it loud and clear: _We know how to do our jobs, we don't need a cadet telling us what to do_.

One of the armory officers glanced darkly at Tilly and leaned over to mutter something to an engineer next to her. The words were indistinct and Tilly could only make out the cadence, but she could tell it was about her.

"I guess you, um, have this in hand!" she exclaimed, backing away from the torpedo.

She almost backed right into Stamets. "Careful, cadet," he said, but not unkindly. The fever dream memory of Tilly at his bedside when the rest of the crew had given up on him and branded him a murderer was still fresh in his mind. "Why don't you take twenty?"

"That's—It's my math. I should be here." The statement could have been territorial, but the way Tilly said it, it sounded more like an expression of personal responsibility in the event something went wrong.

"Might be the last break you get," pointed out Stamets, which was a not-so-subtle reminder they were currently engaged in a course of action that spelled their own doom. He half-smiled. "Besides, I haven't been pulling double-duty like you have, 'captain.'"

Tilly glanced down at the Terran armor she was still wearing. Suddenly a few of the looks she had been getting made sense. She realized what the armory officer had said: _Who does she think she is, a real captain?_

"I'm just gonna..." Tilly backed towards the door.

As she hurried through the corridors to the quarters she and Burnham shared, it felt like people were staring at her. Tilly suppressed the urge to run. The moment the door closed behind her, she gasped; she had almost been holding her breath the whole way. The armor and black uniform underneath came off and she kicked the Terran outfit away, shuddering at the sensation of straightened hair sweeping across her shoulders.

It was a relief when the spray of hot water hit her scalp and even more so when the polymers coating her hair into a simulacrum of the other Tilly washed down into the drain along with her counterpart's heavier makeup. The rush of hot air afterwards turned her hair back into the familiar, frizzy halo of red curls. When she turned on the holographic mirror, she was greeted by the sight of her own face and hair. She smiled in happy recognition. Maybe the other version of her was prettier, more polished, more presentable, but the cheery blue eyes and impossible mess of red hair in front of her felt honest and authentic, and putting on the gold-trimmed blue of her Starfleet uniform felt like stepping back into her own skin.

Even the rank felt right. Cadet. A rank she had earned and was proud of. She recalled that line O'Malley had said about people being sexiest as themselves and suppressed a giggle at the memory of all that awkwardness. The amusement died as she remembered O'Malley was on the Charon now, and Burnham, too, both of them in danger with everyone on Discovery counting on them to save the universe.

Upon her return to engineering, Stamets smiled. Only a half-smile again because that was all he could manage through his grief, but it was entirely genuine. "Glad to have you back, cadet."

"Good to be back, lieutenant," Tilly answered, taking up a position at an open console off to the side. From there, she could check the torpedo modifications without breathing down anyone's neck. Everything seemed perfectly on track and according to specifications.

"Ready for the spores," announced Kumar.

As they pulled the spore containment modules from the wall where they were stored, Tilly's heart fell into the pit of her stomach and vanished like a stone into the depths.

Two of the canisters were empty. Nine were full, but two were empty. Stamets was beside himself. "Why are these empty? Where are my spores!" From him, the word _my_ remained a territorial proclamation.

Because Tilly was everything her mirror counterpart was not, she could not stand quietly and leave his question unanswered. Her hands pressed nervously together in feeble prayer. "Uh, lieutenant..."

To say Stamets was displeased with the confession that followed was a massive understatement. "You _what?_ " he exclaimed, incredulous, and dragged her down to confront her coconspirator.

Absent O'Malley and with its main area of research now public knowledge on Discovery, the advanced security protocols on Lab 26 had been withdrawn, but access to the lab itself remained restricted. Stamets was left ringing the proverbial doorbell and the humans inside were disinclined to grant him access. "I can get security down here," Stamets threatened.

"Oh yeah?" was Groves' taunting response over the door comm, but Groves was not one of the two people with control over the doors.

Tilly tried to remove the need for this confrontation entirely. "I did the math with the actual quantities we had on hand—" This was a fact she had mentioned a few times now to Stamets, that Mischkelovitz's spores had already been accounted for, but each time he disregarded it.

"That's not the point! The point is, either I am coming in there, or I'm coming in with a security team," said Stamets.

"That is unnecessary, of course you may come inside," came Lalana's artificially cheery, translator-generated voice, and the doors opened. Lalana was sitting on the workbench behind Mischkelovitz. The table's height placed her at a comfortable conversational height with the humans in the room. Mischkelovitz was at her desk and Groves on the far side of the room with his feet up and a basketball in his hands. Lalana moved to the edge of the table nearest Stamets and Tilly and tilted her head at them. "How may we help you?"

"You can start by giving me back my spores," was Stamets' response.

Mischkelovitz startled and looked at Tilly and Stamets, eyes wide with panic and accusation.

"What spores?" asked Groves, but Stamets ignored him entirely in favor of glaring at Mischkelovitz.

Mischkelovitz's mind raced. She looked down at her desk. Six inches from her feet sat the entrance to the compartment where she slept. All she had to do was duck down and slip into the wall and this problem would be gone as surely as all problems disappeared when she went into the walls because the whole universe disappeared when you went into the walls.

But then the spores would disappear, too. Stamets might take them while she hid.

That was not something Mischkelovitz could allow. Not when she was beginning to get an inkling as to what was on the line, not when she was finally starting to understand. Her hands balled into fists. She could hear the words of the person she still considered her captain despite his status as a monster and an imposter, the man who had claimed a part of her she was glad to have given him because he had given her something important in return. _You're stronger than you know. This version of you is the best one, tears and all_. This coming from a man who knew a version of her that was an executive officer on a starship.

She was smart enough to know it might all be a lie, every word Lorca had ever said, but when she thought about the look on his face as he said those words, it felt sincere. He believed it in her memory and so she believed it, too.

Mischkelovitz stood up and turned to face Stamets. "You can't have them."

Stamets was expecting pushback and said gravely, "If you don't give me those spores, everything in existence is going to die."

From across the room, Groves said, "Cool."

Stamets squinted at Groves incredulously. "No, not _cool_ , specialist. Very much _uncool_."

"Existence is overrated," Groves said, tossing the basketball straight up so it almost but not quite touched the ceiling.

Tilly and Lalana watched this exchange with entirely opposite reactions. Tilly looked upset at the idea anyone would so nonchalantly disregard the seriousness of the situation while Lalana quietly clicked her tongue, trying not to make her amusement too obvious. Thankfully neither Tilly nor Stamets were well-versed enough in lului social habits to pick up on the laughter.

(Groves knew what the tongue clicks meant and took a small measure of pride in making Lalana laugh. There were so many morning conversations between them, so many secrets and amusements they shared that were unknown to everyone else. An entire crass friendship buried under the radar in the margins of the ship's culture where they both lived.)

Recalling all the nonsense of null time, Stamets decided Lorca might have been right to lock Groves up in the brig. Stamets rolled his eyes and returned his attention to Mischkelovitz. "I'm giving you one chance to make this right, doctor. Then I'm calling Saru."

This was the worst thing Stamets could have done. Groves responded to being ignored in favor of his half-sister the way he usually did: bombastically. "You're gonna _tattle?_ " he said loudly. "Jesus, how old are you that you need to call mommy to come help you solve your problems?"

"This doesn't concern you, just stay out of it," Stamets said, thinking that would end it.

"If it concerns Mischka, it concerns me," replied Groves and threw his basketball so it whizzed by Stamets' ear and bounced harmlessly into the space between the workbench and the far wall.

This was the worst thing Groves could have done. It reminded Stamets of a particularly unpleasant series of schoolyard encounters from his childhood. (Groves would have characterized those encounters, bullying and all, as "lucky," because he would have given anything to be hit in the face with a basketball by someone his own age when he was young.) "Hey, watch it!" shouted Stamets. "You almost hit me!"

"If I wanted to hit you, I would have," Groves said. "Now how about you take a step back from my client before I file charges against you for harassment and professional misconduct."

"That's—you can't—"

"Wanna bet?"

"I'm sorry, is there some part of 'we're all going to die' that you're not getting?" From Stamets' perspective, their circumstances rendered questions of jurisprudence entirely moot.

"We should be so lucky," said Groves, already entirely certain they weren't all going to die. Like Saru, he was operating with knowledge suggesting they would survive whatever was coming next. Some of them, anyway. Sticking with Mischkelovitz was more than mere familial obligation at this point. The recording of her from some future made standing next to her his safest bet.

"What the hell is your problem," grumbled Stamets aloud.

"How much time you got? Right, you think the universe is ending, so probably not enough."

"That's not something I _think_ , that is an objective _fact_. If we don't stop the Terrans from draining the network—"

"Objection," said Groves. "Counsel is assuming facts not in evidence."

"I don't have time to school you on the finer points of the mycelial network's integration into the very fabric of reality, _counselor_."

Groves dropped his feet and leaned forward. "Oh, you wanna talk fabric of reality? Because here's a few points you've got wrong—"

Sensing this was getting thoroughly derailed to no end, Tilly jumped in, eager to deescalate the situation. "Maybe we should all take a step back!" she blurted hopefully.

"So that we can dance?" asked Lalana, fully aware that was not what Tilly meant.

Groves smirked. "What were you thinking, a jig, a waltz?"

"The electric boogaloo," said Lalana, and Groves clapped his hands over his mouth to stifle his laughter, suffocating himself.

Stamets pressed his hands to the sides of his face and rocked back slightly on his feet. "You're all insane," he realized.

"It has been my experience that all humans are, each of you in your own amazing and wonderful ways," offered Lalana. "But as you are endeavoring to preserve reality as we know it, I think it best that we return your spores to you. Emellia?"

Mischkelovitz's eyes were staring unfocused off into the distance. Groves' outburst had given her enough time to realize something. Her voice was oddly calm as she spoke. "You can't have them back. I already used them to save someone I love."

No one expected this answer. Groves resumed breathing in a series of wheezing coughs, thoroughly sobered by Mischkelovitz's admission.

"You used them?" echoed Tilly.

"Yes," said Mischkelovitz firmly, her eyes refocusing.

"To..." Stamets rolled over those words in his mind. He reached a conclusion based on a very limited understanding of Mischkelovitz's relationship to their former captain. "Was this something you did for Lorca? Are you... Are you _in love_ with _Lorca?_ "

Normally, this was where Mischkelovitz corrected that notion, but not this time. This time she said nothing. She was entirely and uncharacteristically tranquil.

Out of all the craziness of the past few days, Stamets found the idea of anyone loving Lorca hardest to swallow. "After what he did, how could you possibly?"

Lalana's tail cut sharply through the air for attention. "How can you not?"

"Easily," Groves muttered, but kept otherwise quiet because he could tell Mischkelovitz was up to something and that was far more interesting to him than the fate of the universe.

Lalana hunched slightly so her glassy eyes were level with Stamets and spun her hands. "Gabriel likes you so very much, Paul. Even though you have often been at odds with one another, he would not have spent so much time with you if he did not think you were worth the effort. Together you achieved the impossible. I know he takes great pride in that."

 _Together?_ Stamets silently questioned the validity of the idea Lorca's manipulations could be characterized as a collaboration in any sense of the word. He was revulsed by the assertion. The way Lorca had manipulated them all, run them ragged, shouted at them, subverted them for his own means... They were standing in another universe, which under any other circumstance would have been amazing, but at what price?

Lalana was not done. "Do you know what Gabriel loves most?" she asked.

The question was not an easy one for Stamets to answer. "Fucking with everyone?" he suggested.

"The stars. No matter who he is or where he is from, Gabriel Lorca always loves the stars, and being captain to a crew he inspires. He loves it as deeply as you love your husband. Everything he has done has been to hold on to the stars. I know this is true because it was true for the other Gabriel Lorca, the man I knew as my husband. This Gabriel is the only thing I have left of him. As someone who has lost a husband, too, would you not do anything to get him back? Would you not do anything to see his face?"

Stamets was gutted. Mentioning Culber was a manipulation as thorough as any Lorca might have initiated, but coming from this alien whose translated voice seemed full of hope and optimism and caring, it felt almost like a kindred thought. (As Lalana intended it to. Groves could see that now.)

Stamets had seen Culber, in fact, when he was trapped inside the mycelial network. It was an experience that meant everything to him and which he could not adequately describe to anyone who had not experienced it firsthand. They had talked of opera, of things they would never again share, and even if the Culber in the network had merely been the work of some mycelial manifestation born out of Stamets' own subconscious, it had given him more time with someone he loved.

It had also, in a strange way, given him some closure. How real it had been and how much an illusion did not matter. It only mattered that in some way, Culber was alive for him in those moments. He was doing all this for Culber. Some part of him was going to do everything for the rest of his life in memory of his husband.

He also remembered how, for two brief moments, Lorca had looked when he talked about a new era of exploration. The first, standing in the ready room sharing the mycelial network's multiversal potential with Stamets, and then again on the deck of the shuttlebay looking at the view of Pahvo through the forcefield. The dark cloud of anger seemed to lift and Lorca had seemed not only very human, but very Starfleet. Perhaps both moments were merely the product of Lorca's aims to return to his universe, but it felt like there had been some kernel of sincerity in that love of exploration. The love that drew all of them, down to the last person, to join Starfleet.

"Not _anything_ ," said Stamets almost breathlessly, because he remained a decent person with lines he would not cross, and the comparison between the two Lorcas surely had to be as vast a divide as there seemed to be between the two versions of Stamets, one of them working for the betterment of the universe and the other greedily furthering its destruction.

Bored by all of this, Mischkelovitz turned away from them all and sat down at her desk again, resuming her work. She still found Stamets annoyingly small-minded and none of what had just transpired changed her opinion of him in the slightest.

"It is unfortunate we do not have any spores for you," said Lalana. "I hope this does not cost us the universe."

"It's—" Tilly's voice came out as a high-pitched squeak. She swallowed. "It should be fine."

As soon as Stamets and Tilly were gone, Groves remarked, "I don't think he bought your 'face' argument."

"That is fine," said Lalana. "It has given him reason to doubt. Sometimes that is enough."

Groves shook his head. "I really don't get you. Did you even love the original Lorca?"

Lalana hopped down from the table and picked up the basketball with her tail, slinging it over to Groves with surprising ease given that she had never touched a basketball before this moment. "They are both the original Gabriel, they simply come from different universes."

"Cut the semantics," retorted Groves, putting the basketball down on the ground in a manner signifying the time for games was now officially over. "You know what I mean."

Lalana's fur rippled. "Nn, I did not at first. Initially I was only manipulating him and using him as a means to further my own passage through the stars. It was not until I met more of your species, and very many other species, that I realized how truly special he was. How lovely to know that there was not only one Gabriel Lorca. Two is a much better number. All good things come in pairs." She tapped her fingers together in example of this, since lului had paired-off fingers, strode across the lab to her quarters, and disappeared inside.

Groves shook his head. Alien to the last, with ethics to match. On some level he wondered how well Lalana could really tell any of them apart given the equivalency she afforded the two Lorcas and he marveled at the extent to which Starfleet—and indeed the whole of the known universe—seemed to have underestimated her simply because the lului chose to live in a such primitive state. It reminded Groves of his favorite book, Brave New World, and one of the many questions posed by its two central characters: was it better to live miserable and enlightened like John the Savage, or happily ignorant like Bernard Marx and his technologically-advanced society of soma addicts? The circumstances were reversed slightly with the lului. On their planet, it was technological enlightenment that was seen as a source of misery and suffering and their primitive life was the idyllic and ignorant ideal. Groves entirely saw the appeal at this point. Would that he had never embarked upon this voyage of the damned and remained back on Earth with his head down waiting for the war to be over.

Still. He had questions, even if he was worried what the answers would be. "Mischka!" He had to shout for her three times to get her to look up from her desk. "What the hell was that about? When did you use those spores? And for what?"

Mischkelovitz did not look at Groves so much as through him, her eyes staring wild and unfocused into an imagined distance where she saw something no one else could because it existed only in her mind. It was the face of Milosz Mischkelovitz smiling lopsidedly at her, his thoughts forevermore lost to her. "Time is a flat circle," she intoned.

Groves understood immediately and fully. He stared at Mischkelovitz in amazement. This was not the same person who hid in walls and chewed things and grieved and obsessed and lied about as well as she made friends with outsiders. He asked her in qoryan, "[Who are you?]"

She only smiled and turned back to her work.

Her smile sent a chill down Groves' back. How he wished he could return to a moment of happy ignorance before he had asked that question, before any and all of this. Instead, he was struck by the momentary panic it was, as always, too late, and if he was being completely honest, there were no moments of happy ignorance in his past to escape to. His wish was an exercise in enduring futility.

Groves sat for a long moment in silence. He started to reach for his padd and stopped. After everything he had just seen and heard, a pot of tea sounded like a good way to calm the nerves before starting up a new chess match.

Around them, hidden in the walls of Lab 26, pulsed the glowing blue lights of a full canister of _Prototaxites stellaviatori_. Mischkelovitz had not lied about the spores to Stamets. She had found the truth in what she was saying: they were all dead yesterday.

* * *

At Stamets' insistence, Tilly re-ran all the simulations to determine what difference two more canisters of spores would have made to the final result of their pending self-immolation. It turned out, not very much. They had enough spores to attain critical mass, trigger a cascade, remove the blockage from the mycelial network, and save the universe. The only thing two more canisters would have done was incinerate them much more quickly.

Tilly blinked. The two-canister difference meant there was going to be enough of a delay for them to actually react to the explosion, and as she watched the wave of energy sweep across her simulation of the Charon and Discovery, she realized something else.

"Captain was right," she said. It felt good to use the title to refer to Saru.

"What about?" said Stamets, joining her at the console as the simulation played out again.

They both saw it. The shockwave that would result from this explosion was not just an immense concussive force, it was also pure mycelial energy.

The same mycelial energy Discovery used for its spore-based propulsion.

"If we can stay right on the leading edge, we can ride it long enough for the energy to activate the drive and then you can navigate us home," said Tilly hopefully.

"But, um, this ship's shields still aren't strong enough to protect us," said Stamets, brow furrowed. His mind began to race. Shields weren't the only thing that protected starships from the dangers of high-speed space travel. "Unless we modify the spore drive to run concurrently with the warp drive. The resulting warp bubble may provide a secondary layer of protection, a shield from the blast."

A look at Tilly confirmed the viability of this train of thought. Stamets continued, encouraged. "If I reverse-engineer the coordinates that Lorca used to get us here, I should be able to pinpoint the—the right pathway to take. And, and that will get us to the same point in our timeline. Or at least close to it."

As amazed as she was, Tilly immediately latched onto the enormity of what Stamets was proposing. "There will be infinite pathways opening up in front of you, th-that's gonna be really..."

"'Hard' is the word you're looking for?" asked Stamets. He smiled. "But I don't accept no-win scenarios. Thank you for your inspiration, cadet."

Tilly's heart skipped a beat. "Does this mean you forgive me?"

That was a big ask, but it did. "Cadet, your little indiscretion might just have saved us all. Now, please, inform the captain of your findings." Honestly, even if this did not work, the elation on Tilly's face made the idea feel worthwhile.

To think. A full set of spore canisters and they would all have been dead. Instead, they were about to take one final, decisive jump, as Stamets had intended they do at Pahvo. One last jump to take them home.


	94. Let Me Give You My Life

Lorca and O'Malley returned to the resplendent glory of the throne room, the shimmer of its golden-hued lights still conjuring the memory of its former master and her affection for the garish tones. Landry was standing at the command console, flanked by guards and technicians working to secure the Charon's systems. Control of the ship, while hardly definitive, was symbolic of control of the Empire. Symbols had power, Lorca knew, and this was a symbol he could ill afford to give up in his present circumstance.

Larsson's body remained a grim centerpiece in the middle of the room. The ugly burn of phaser fire on the side of his head was a harsh reminder as to the realities of this universe. O'Malley stopped and stared at Larsson, transfixed, unable to move past the corpse literally and figuratively.

Lorca had no such compunctions and stepped over Larsson's outstretched arm, joining Landry at the console. Landry glared dimly at Lorca and O'Malley in appraisal and said, "That was quick."

Lorca responded in kind, his half-amused glare equally judgmental. "This is hardly the time for sarcasm," he retorted. "Where's Burnham?"

Landry squinted in confusion— _sarcasm?_ —but she gave him the report. "Internal sensors are still offline. We have teams sweeping the halls."

There seemed to have been very little progress during Lorca and O'Malley's detour. Lorca was momentarily reminded of the other Landry's shortcomings and grimaced with displeasure. "I didn't pull you out of that booth because I like you, commander," he said wryly. "Get me those sensors."

A smirk tugged at Landry's mouth. As much as it was a rebuke, there was a joke in there, too, and Lorca's trademark dark humor never ceased to amuse, even when it was at her expense. "Yes, sir. If you liked me, you wouldn't have left that eyesore there." She jerked her chin in the direction of Larsson's body.

Lorca raised an eyebrow. "Dead body bothering you?" He was reminded again of the other Landry and it soured his humor somewhat.

Landry casually ignored the taunt and said, "I don't understand why you didn't just vaporize him."

From the other side of Larsson's body, O'Malley looked up, alarmed. "You vaporize people?"

"Enemies," clarified Lorca. "We vaporize enemies."

"And allies when we don't want to clean up the mess," said Landry. The enduring curl of her lip suggested she thought this was such an occasion.

It was amusing, really, how O'Malley could still be horrified by the simplest, most everyday practices in the Terran Empire. "Sometimes it's a kindness," Lorca offered.

Landry snorted in laughter, but there was truth to it. Lorca had administered that truth several times in the past, most recently in the weeks leading up to the transporter accident. Then, Lorca had found himself saddled with a pair of rebel spies. Had their capture not been so embarrassingly public, he could have quietly released them to return to Sarek with their intel. Instead, he had been forced to throw around the clout of his position to ensure that the spies were remanded to his custody rather than Captain Tilly's. He spared them the experience of Georgiou's tender, drawn-out mercies and turned both operatives into flickers of dust.

Georgiou's ire had been total and immediate when she arrived. "You didn't leave me anything to play with," she chided him, but of course he had, and she made sure he knew it. Always the agonizer in her hand ended up in the same spot, the location frustratingly unreachable to compound the shame because it forced him to reveal the mark in order to be rid of it. Dozens of times the scar had been erased and recreated over the years. Each time Lorca told himself it was the last. This time, it finally would be.

The important thing was the intel had reached Sarek in the end and neither spy had survived to tell Georgiou the truth about Lorca's loyalties. That their deaths had kept his secret a few more weeks in no way diminished the kindness of sparing them months of agony at Georgiou's hands. The spies themselves surely preferred dying to protect the identity of one of Sarek's most valuable assets to being tortured. A coin could be polished on both sides.

The memory was fleeting. Lorca shifted his attention back to Landry and pointed out, "I didn't say you had to leave him there. You could've dragged him off somewhere."

There was a moment of confusion as Landry wondered when she was supposed to have found the time to do that, but since she now had the go-ahead to dispose of the body as she saw fit, she barked at a nearby guard, "Park! Take out the trash." The guard stepped forward with his phaser rifle at the ready.

"No!" said O'Malley. "He's my officer. He's my responsibility."

While O'Malley struggled to drag Larsson's body off to the side (no one moved to help him and he did not ask), Landry remarked, "He really isn't the same O'Malley, is he."

"He's loyal," said Lorca.

Landry looked at O'Malley with approval for the first time. "Then he's one of us."

With his attention on the task of moving Larsson, O'Malley did not see the wistfully appreciative smile on Lorca's face. Larsson was probably a hundred pounds heavier than O'Malley and watching O'Malley grunt and strain was like watching a live comedy routine being performed for a private audience. Lorca shook his head in amusement.

A message came in over the comms. The bulk of Georgiou's remaining followers had been located holed up at the far end of the palatial complex. Landry could scarcely contain her excitement as she looked to Lorca for permission.

"Go," said Lorca. Landry signaled some guards to join her and ran off with an expression of unbridled glee.

O'Malley finally managed to get Larsson over to the wall where the EV suits were. Lorca's mirth was replaced by confusion as O'Malley began to fiddle with the EV suits. He walked over, curious. "What are you doing, Mac?"

Each of the EV suits was equipped with an emergency transponder. O'Malley was stripping the transponders off and syncing them. "Making sure he gets home."

Lorca sighed. "He's dead. It doesn't matter."

"Maybe not to him. But to the people around him it does." O'Malley secured one of the transponders to Larsson's body and strapped the other around his own wrist.

Lorca gestured to two guards nearby. "Stash him in there," he ordered. The two guards dragged Larsson's corpse over to the little tea room where it would not be in anyone's way.

"What next?" asked O'Malley.

There was one important thing Petrellovitz had gotten wrong: Lalana wasn't the pet, it was the freckled colonel whose bleeding heart made him bend over backwards to please the people around him. "Now you help me flush out Burnham," said Lorca.

The message O'Malley broadcast was simple. "Specialist Burnham, this is Colonel O'Malley. Discovery sent me to collect you. If you turn yourself over to Lorca's forces, I've been assured that you won't be harmed."

Amazingly, it worked. Burnham answered. "How do I know you are who you say you are?"

O'Malley thought a moment. "Ship's a big circle."

While that snippet from Burnham and O'Malley's only previous conversation was something Lorca could have known from watching Discovery's security feeds, the thought process that played out across O'Malley's face seemed to indicate it was a genuine memory. Burnham kept her face impassive. "I'm sending coordinates to meet, and I have something with me I think you'll like." On that mysterious note, she cut the feed.

"What d'you suppose that means?" asked O'Malley.

"Guess we'll find out," said Lorca, running his fingers across the glowing pipes of Georgiou's throne. His throne now. There were a number of features on the Charon he intended to change, but the throne was not one of them. His eyes landed on the hilt of Georgiou's sword in its scabbard. The sword he would replace. Though he had not been present for the deed, he knew this was the same blade that had cleaved the nameless slave's head from her shoulders all those years ago. He had pictured that grim moment so many times, wondering what the green-eyed woman's last moments had been like. Did she fight, did she struggle? Or did she go quietly to her fate, accepting the inevitable price of his affections?

While Lorca frowned at the sword, O'Malley turned away and glanced around the throne room, wondering what the hell he was going to do once Burnham showed up and how in the hell he had gotten himself into this mess in the first place.

"You don't really have any skills, do you?" asked Lorca, beginning to wonder what exactly he was going to do with O'Malley himself.

O'Malley winced. "I can cook a mean frittata," he managed.

Lorca barked in laughter. "Useful skills!"

"A frittata is entirely useful when you're hungry," countered O'Malley. "But if you mean in the context of the Terran Empire, then probably not so much. Your lot don't seem to have much use for negotiators." O'Malley sighed, crossed his arms, and glared at the floor. The massive orb of the mycelial reactor pulsed unseen beneath their feet, a silent reminder of his supposed mission objective to disable the reactor's shield so Discovery could save the mycelial network and kill them all. Up until now, he had been using his promise to Saru as the reason why he was not completing that objective, but once Burnham turned up he was going to need a new excuse.

Lorca drew the sword from its scabbard again, spotting his reflection in the blade. At some point, the cut on his forehead had reopened and the dark smear of dried blood down the side of his face had been joined by a line of fresher red. "You could polish my sword."

O'Malley squeaked in surprise as his head shot up, then he realized Lorca was being literal.

"Wait," said Lorca, lighting up with delight, "you didn't think I meant..." His grin made it all too clear he had chosen the words intentionally.

O'Malley clapped a hand over his eyes. "I hate you!" he whimpered unconvincingly.

"What the hell would your wife think!" laughed Lorca, finding the punchline even funnier the second time around. He was still snickering when the throne room doors opened and Burnham came striding in, flanked by several of Lorca's guards and holding a phaser on a prisoner of her own: Philippa Georgiou. The laughter died abruptly as Lorca's breath caught in his throat at the sight of them both. Georgiou was glowering darkly and Burnham looked determined, confident, and strong, like his Michael.

Lorca stepped down from the dais, unable to repress the smile on his face at the sight of her. "Michael," he greeted. "What's this about?"

"I won't let another crew die on my watch, Gabriel," Burnham answered, spitting Lorca's given name as if it were an invective. She grabbed Georgiou's shoulder and pushed the former emperor forward. Georgiou stumbled to her knees. "I've been here long enough to know that if you want your claim to the throne to be legitimate, you have to execute the emperor."

A thrill of excitement pulsed down Lorca's spine and he jerked his head to the side. "And you're prepared to condemn Philippa here to death?" Behind Lorca, O'Malley stared, shocked.

Burnham remained the very picture of intense determination. "What you said on the shuttle yesterday was right. She's not my Philippa."

Lorca decided he and Sarek might have been wrong about this Burnham. She might have what it took to rule in this universe after all. "That's very Terran of you. But you and I both know that I have her now. What are you really bargaining with?"

"I think you know," said Burnham, and her voice suddenly sounded softer and warmer when she said it. Lorca's face was a question; he had no idea what she meant, so she clarified: "In exchange for my crew, I offer you me. Let them leave safely and I'm yours."

Lorca's heart skipped a beat, or maybe stopped entirely. He could scarcely believe his ears. She was offering him the thing he wanted most in the universe. There were no words equal to what he was feeling. The sense of elation made him feel weightless, the joy threatened to overwhelm, and he understood suddenly how people could cry from happiness because he almost felt like crying except there were too many people around to witness it if he did.

An edge of desperation slipped in to Burnham's voice. "Like you said, my future is here. But know this: I'm offering you my mind, nothing more."

Lorca took a breath and nodded. There was something a little too confident in it because in the back of his head he was thinking that, given enough time, Burnham might just come to see in him the same things Michael had. He was finally going to get the chance to explain everything he had done and show her Michael's vision for the empire. A vision she might find she shared once she understood it.

"Hold on," said O'Malley from the back of the room, "what? Are you—are you talking about Discovery's crew?"

Burnham fixed O'Malley with a glare that was equal parts solemn and desperate. "I am. And I'm prepared to trade myself to guarantee their safety. Yours included."

O'Malley realized Burnham thought Lorca was a threat to the people aboard Discovery. "That's not—"

Lorca raised a hand to silence O'Malley. "For you, Michael, I'll spare them. You have my word."

O'Malley realized what Lorca was doing. Now that he understood the depths of Lorca's connection to Burnham, he saw it mirrored perfectly Lalana's connection to Lorca. As Lalana was prepared to do anything to keep Lorca's face at her side, so Lorca was willing to do anything to keep Burnham's, including play into her preconceptions of him.

"Thank you, Gabriel," said Burnham, struggling slightly over his given name.

Lorca motioned the guards to take Burnham's phaser. "Until you've settled in. I'm sure you understand." Burnham handed over the weapon without complaint. Lorca stepped towards Georgiou, feeling the weight of the sword in his hand. "Well. It looks like you are destined to be betrayed by Burnhams in every universe!"

"No," said Georgiou, as darkly vitriolic as ever as she glared up at him. "I'm destined to kill you."

"Wow. That would certainly be an impressive trick," said Lorca. It wasn't much of a joke, really, but it elicited a few chuckles from the assembled crew in the room. (O'Malley did not laugh. He looked pale as a sheet.) Lorca's gaze drifted back up to Burnham. "Welcome home, Michael."

The throne room doors opened again and Landry entered, surprised to find Lorca already with an audience. "We've executed her lords and senior officers, sir," Landry reported as she joined Lorca's side. "The rest of the crew are swearing allegiance to you."

"Good." Lorca hefted the sword up and balanced the blade on his fingers. His words were slow, the exhaustion audible as he said, "I was just thinking about everyone who's ever said that victory felt empty when it was attained." He paused. "What a bunch of idiots they were."

Landry grinned in amused delight. All those months in agony booths and all Lorca had to do was come back, crack a few jokes, and suddenly everything was all better. She turned her impish grin towards Georgiou. "Did I make it in time for the execution?"

"You should broadcast it," said Burnham quickly. "Display your victory to the whole of the Empire. But first, I'd like to contact Discovery. Let them know I'm staying."

"Sure," said Lorca, motioning for the technician at the command console to comply.

While Landry briefed Lorca on the Charon's tactical situation and Burnham gave the technician her security code to contact Discovery, O'Malley took the opportunity to approach Burnham and said, "You didn't have to do that."

Burnham spoke in a low voice so the guards nearest her would not hear. "I'm doing exactly what I have to, colonel. He was never going to let me leave."

It was hard for O'Malley to argue with that, but there were things Burnham didn't know. "Look, Burnham, you don't understand, Gabriel's—"

"Discovery has dropped out of warp, sir," reported the technician, cutting O'Malley off. The ship appeared on the viewscreen behind the throne.

For most of the Terrans in the throne room, the sight of Discovery was meaningless, but not Lorca. Seeing the ship again, he felt the same sense of elation and pride as he had the first time he set eyes on its sleek nacelles and the rings of its saucer. The ship was so beautiful, but his enjoyment of it was bittersweet. The ship had given him so many incredible gifts and now he was trading it for one final gift: keeping Burnham at his side.

Lalana would be disappointed, but she was safer on Discovery than among Terrans. At least he could get Petrellovitz back now.

"Hail them," he ordered.

It took Discovery a moment to answer. Saru's face appeared on the viewscreen.

"Mister Saru," said Lorca. "It's good to see you. I'm glad I got a chance to say goodbye to you and the rest of the crew. I want you to know that my admiration for you was and is sincere. When I look at you, I see the formidable unit of soldiers that I sculpted. If I thought for a second that any of you were capable of relinquishing this cult-like devotion to the Federation, I'd enlist your skills today."

"We are not interested in your sentiments," said Saru sharply. "Where are Specialist Burnham, Colonel O'Malley, and Lieutenant Larsson?"

"Larsson didn't make it," said Lorca, "but O'Malley and Burnham are fine. You don't die today because she chose to stay by my side." It was important to make that public, to make sure Burnham thought she needed to stay with Lorca.

"I would like to hear that from her," said Saru. "You are not a reliable source."

That stung a little, even if it was the honest culmination of every lie Lorca had told in the other universe. He stepped aside so Saru could see Burnham and O'Malley.

"I'm where I need to be, Saru," Burnham said. "This is my place."

O'Malley visibly swallowed. "I'm sorry, this hasn't gone according to plan."

Saru had the unsettling feeling O'Malley's apology had nothing to do with Larsson. "That is all I needed to see," Saru said. There was a tone of finality in his words that struck Lorca as slightly odd. His brain sluggishly attempted to parse this incongruity.

Not quickly enough. Burnham whirled towards the guard nearest her, tore the weapon from his hands, and kicked him to the ground at the same time as Georgiou, still kneeling on the ground, spun and swept the legs out from under the guard next to her and took his weapon.

Lorca turned away from the transmission, drawing his phaser, and Landry began firing her rifle, but Burnham and Georgiou managed to dodge, Burnham spinning backwards to safety. O'Malley dove towards the command console for cover.

Burnham was badly outnumbered. Saru did the only thing he could do to help her from Discovery's bridge and shouted an order to fire.

Discovery's phasers struck the Charon right above the throne room. The blast shook the room down to the supports. Debris rained down from above and flames erupted across the floor and walls. Lorca was thrown to the ground, not by the debris, but by the nearest guard covering him to protect him. He could feel the impact of heavy rubble through the guard's body and heard a crack as something broke the guard's back and turned him into dead weight. Lorca crawled out from under the guard's body and staggered to his feet.

Georgiou and Burnham were on the other side of the room, cutting through Lorca's forces with ease. After so many months spent in agonizer booths, the guards were simply no match for a pair of well-fed, well-rested opponents.

Georgiou had found a small dagger and came menacingly towards Lorca through the smoke and flickering flames. She lunged at Lorca, but he managed to grab hold of the hand with the dagger and tried to wrench the weapon away from her. When that failed, he smashed his head against Georgiou's face. The force of the blow knocked her free from Lorca's grasp and he was forced to dance away from her in steps that mimicked the dance he had done over the years to escape her mercurial bloodthirst in a disturbingly literal sense.

He knew that dance well, and as the adrenaline washed away every iota of exhaustion, he managed to get hold of Georgiou's arm again, this time spinning her around into his grasp entirely, hugging her to his chest to use the full advantage of his strength to immobilize her. He turned the knife in Georgiou's hands towards her and tried to force it in the direction of her chest.

In an incredible feat of flexibility, Georgiou kicked her leg up and around, hitting Lorca in the face and staggering him back. She followed up with a kick that sent Lorca back to the ground and he rolled to the side, reeling.

Two guards arrived, charging Georgiou. The first fell as Georgiou's knife sliced across his neck, the second dropping to a devastating assault of blows to the head from Georgiou's fists.

As Lorca regained his footing, he saw Burnham pressed up against the wall and the glint of a blade near her throat. He grabbed the first thing he saw—Georgiou's gaudy sword—and swung it, slicing Burnham's assailant across the torso.

Too late he realized it was Landry. She fell to the side, winded by the blow and unable to catch her breath from the gash to the lungs.

Burnham seemed not to care that Lorca had just saved her at the expense of his own second in command. Her hand closed around a strip of dislodged metal and she swung at Lorca. He stepped back, eyes widening. Then he felt a sharp sting in his shoulder as something struck him from behind. Georgiou, sticking him with her little knife from across the room.

Before Burnham could take advantage of Lorca's shock and distraction, another of Lorca's guards charged, trying to tackle Burnham and managing at least to keep Burnham occupied while Lorca reached around to try and dig the knife out of his shoulder. He managed to get his fingers on the blade and pull it free. (For once, Georgiou had not hit her favorite, unreachable spot.) He saw Georgiou coming at him again and he threw the knife at her but it clattered to the side, deflected by her armor.

Lorca still had Georgiou's sword in hand. He forced her back with it, movements slow but strong, and managed to drive her towards the stairs leading up to the dais. Georgiou tripped back onto the ground as her foot caught the edge of the steps.

Lorca swung the sword again, but Georgiou's hands found a piece of piping and she swung back at his legs, knocking his feet out from under him. Lorca fell with an angry yell. He swung the sword again as he staggered back up, but the blade struck the metal pipes of the throne, sending a painful shock up his arm. He struck out at Georgiou with his boot, kicking her back, but she managed again to dart away from the wild swings of the sword, and as the sword struck the throne again, it fell from his hand.

The sword's loss seemed to be for the best. Lorca had always preferred manual combat to blades. He punched at Georgiou, pressing her back into the ring of glowing pipes and using the advantage of his reach and strength. As they traded blows, he finally came out ahead, his fist striking Georgiou's face hard enough to drop her.

He turned to assess the tactical situation. O'Malley was at Landry's side, applying pressure to her wound, and Landry had pulled O'Malley's head down towards her so she could say something to him, spraying bloodied spittle onto O'Malley's cheek in the process. Burnham was finishing up with the last of the guards.

There were no guards left. Burnham and Lorca were the only ones still standing. Their eyes met for the briefest of moments and then Burnham was charging across the room at Lorca. She struck at him with quick jabs. He only blocked, refusing to initiate any attack on her. He grabbed her arm, pulling her close. "Wait!"

She ignored the request. She twisted and punched, her attacks relentless. Lorca tried to pin her arm behind her and tried again: "Stop!" Again she twisted again and struck at him. He managed to grab her arm and pull her in again. "Don't make me have to kill you," he begged her through gritted teeth.

"You won't," she snarled at him.

She kept attacking. He blocked and blocked and then she kicked him, hard, and he let out a wet groan of pain. This time, as he staggered back, there was no one to come to his aid. Burnham lunged forward and pulled Lorca, flipping him over her shoulder.

Lorca rolled back towards the throne and found his feet only to discover Burnham pointing a phaser at him. He stared at her, hurt and confused. He was doing everything he could to try to get her to see he was not her enemy. He never had been.

The anger in her face was familiar. It was the same anger he had seen in his Michael so many times, but hers had always been directed at Georgiou, never at him. He realized she hated him the way Michael hated Georgiou. That hurt more than all the bruises and cuts and pain he felt across every inch of his body at this point.

"We would have helped you get home!" Burnham shouted. "If you had asked." Her breaths were heavy from exertion, each sentence a staccato declaration. "That's who Starfleet is. That's who I am."

Lorca swallowed. As if it had ever been that easy. As if anything was that easy. Even Starfleet was not that generous and kind. They had proven as much at Pahvo when they deserted the Pahvans to the oncoming Klingon onslaught. That's who she thought would have helped him? Disloyal, pretend explorers who lacked even the strength to help themselves or the integrity to stand by their ideals when it really counted? Did she know how ridiculous her assertion sounded?

Then the hatred faded from Burnham's face. She lowered the phaser. "That's why I won't kill you now."

Lorca exhaled in relief.

"But I _will!_ " came an angry shout from behind as this time Georgiou hit her favorite spot, but not with an agonizer, with the sword. It pierced Lorca's back near his spine, went straight through his armor and his ribs until the tip of the blade was jutting out eight inches from his chest.

Lorca's breath was an anguished whine through his throat. Georgiou wrenched the blade back and he stood there, feeling a wetness trickle down his back and a tremendous pressure in his chest unlike anything he had ever experienced. His impossibly bright blue eyes stared desperately at Michael.

At Michael. In the moment, he saw his Michael. He slid forward, managing a step towards her, reaching his hands out towards her. "We—we could've—"

Burnham looked at him, shocked, apology written over her features as obviously as anything had ever been written on his, but she did not reciprocate his desperate attempt for human contact. She stepped aside, unwilling to offer him even a moment's comfort, unwilling to even pretend it. As much as there was an apology on her face, there was no compassion, only revulsion.

He fell sideways, onto his knees at the top of the stairs. Georgiou opened the hatch in the floor that led to the mycelial reactor and kicked Lorca forward, sending him rolling down the stairs towards the waiting void.

Something crashed into Lorca from the side, pushing him away from the opening, and he was enveloped in a blinding white light.


	95. Maybe I'm Amazed

The familiar metallic sheen of the transporter rang in Lorca's ears as the blisteringly white light stabbed daggers in his eyes that for once he barely registered against the overwhelming, boulder-like pressure in his chest. The shift of particles around him turned the sensation of physical contact into emptiness as the transporter safety protocols isolated him from the rest of the beam-out and deposited him alongside two other forms, all of them in various states of collapse, but his was the one that slumped over with a gurgle onto the surface of the transporter pad, a bloom of red spreading out around him to the rhythm of his slowing heartbeat.

A moment later, O'Malley's arms were around him, a human compress struggling to contain the gaping hole in Lorca's chest. Lorca tried to speak, make one last dig at O'Malley's expense, but he no longer had the strength for it and managed only a weak, wet, rasping groan.

O'Malley's only thought was of his promise to Lalana as he shouted at the startled, curly-haired transporter technician: "One-one transport, Lab 26! _Now!_ " To his credit, the technician defaulted to executing the order without question.

This time, as the white light rose and fell again, the sensation of O'Malley's arms remained constant. One-one transport; slang for transport without positional or biological filtering.

In the confusion, the tech had sent along for the journey the third form on the transporter pad: the hulking mass of Einar Larsson's dead body, still synced to the emergency transponder on O'Malley's wrist.

"Computer! Override door locks, authorization O'Malley Delta-Niner-7-5-2-gray!"

Both doors opened, exposing the contents of the lab directly to the ship for the first time since Discovery's launch.

They were all there: Mischkelovitz, Lalana, Groves. "Help! Help me!" yelled O'Malley, holding on to Lorca as tightly as he could. Lorca groaned faintly. His eyes were losing focus and his limbs felt like lead. Darkness was encircling him. It somehow felt like going home all over again.

Lalana propelled herself across the full five meters between them in two giant, bounding strides, landing directly beside them, and thrust her tail into the hole in Lorca's chest. A moment later, Lorca inhaled a wet, sucking breath. The darkness faded to the edges of his vision as some flow of blood and oxygen returned.

"Do not worry, Gabriel," she said. "I have you, and so does Macarius."

Lorca stared at Lalana, horrified. It felt like the boulder on his chest had doubled in weight and become a pulsing fist, gripping him and squeezing him somehow from the inside out, each pulse a mixture of agony and relief as it made possible his continued respiration and circulation. He was alive though, and breathing, and conscious.

"You need—you need to say goodbye," O'Malley blurted at Lalana, scrunching his nose as tears dripped down his cheeks.

"I would rather say hello," said Lalana as Groves and Mischkelovitz arrived.

Groves did a double-take at the sight of Lalana's tail embedded in Lorca's chest. "Sickbay," Groves started, but Mischkelovitz cut him off. She saw the tears on O'Malley's face and they confirmed everything she had suspected because she was supposed to be the one who cried, not him.

"No!" she shouted, staring wild-eyed at the grisly scene. She finally knew what the message was. Equally, she could see that while O'Malley had not been motivated by any sort of medical expertise, he had accidentally given Lorca his best chance at survival.

Null time, the particle map, the spore field, the temporal remnant, the integrity of history, Lalana, monsters. The only question left was whether it was too late. Words came rushing out of her at an almost unintelligible speed: "I know what to do! The pattern! I can see it! _There are two Discoveries!"_

As usual, no one but Mischkelovitz had any idea what she was talking about. This did not deter her. Her hands began to flap with excitement. "Inside, _now!_ "

"Can we move him?" asked Groves doubtfully, not just because moving Lorca seemed preposterous. Groves had the glimmer of an idea what Mischkelovitz was on about, and if he was right, it was potentially disastrous for them all.

"If Macarius continues to hold on very tightly, then yes," said Lalana.

"I won't let go," said O'Malley. He couldn't bear the thought.

"Hold on," rasped Lorca, "what—"

Groves took Lorca's legs. "On three."

A sharp jolt of pain shot through Lorca, strong enough to release a strangled, gasping half-scream from his lungs. Mischkelovitz ran ahead, shutting the doors as they passed through them, and as the second door closed, she frantically shouted, "Computer! Omega Tau protocol, authorization Mischkelovitz-9-5-8-5-1!"

It was unclear what that meant, but the computer responded, "Omega Tau protocol active, duration fifty-three hours and seventeen minutes. Field integrity at ninety-eight percent. Power reserves at ninety-nine percent."

As O'Malley lacked both height and strength to lift Lorca onto Mischkelovitz's workbench, they proceeded through the lab to Lalana's quarters and put Lorca on the couch. It took all of Lorca's strength to remain conscious during the move. Mischkelovitz did not continue with them the whole way; she lingered in the lab, gathering up supplies.

Once he was on the couch, O'Malley behind him and Lalana at his side, Lorca said, "This is not my kind of threesome." Lalana started clicking her tongue. O'Malley winced and suppressed a groan of annoyance.

"You should let him die just for that," declared Groves.

"Shut up, John!" said O'Malley. "And if you're not going to help, get out." That was invitation enough for Groves to leave. The sight of Lalana's tail in Lorca's chest was deeply unnerving.

An eerie silence fell, broken only by the faint rasps of Lorca's shallow breaths. Lalana and O'Malley were both keeping as still as possible, each concerned too much movement would disrupt the other's role in keeping Lorca alive. Lorca could feel dark exhaustion closing in again. He struggled to keep his eyes open. "I think this is it," he said.

"I'm sorry," said O'Malley, and though Lorca could not see the tears on O'Malley's face, he could hear the anguish in his voice.

"Kill Georgiou. Make sure Michael—tell her—"

O'Malley bit back a sob. Still, at the end of it all, Lorca was more concerned with Michael Burnham than anything else. It was a sickness none of them could cure—a terminal illness that had brought Lorca to this very moment and was killing him right in front of their eyes.

Lalana had more leeway to move than O'Malley. She stretched up slightly and tilted her head at Lorca. "Tell her yourself. I will not let you die."

Lorca smiled faintly. "I don't think _fate_ cares what you want."

She looked at him, her eyes immense, and said, "Hayliel was my heartbeat, and now I am yours. You think this is fate, but it is not. Now that I know there is time travel, I know that it was not fate that I met Hayliel, it was someone's will."

"Then that person wants me dead," Lorca exhaled, closing his eyes.

"No," said Lalana, "she does not."

"That's right," said O'Malley, hopeful again, "Melly doesn't want you dead! She sent a message back through time to save you!"

Lalana tapped her fingers together, amazed at how oblivious humans could be. She decided not to correct them. Let them think this was their story. Lorca was always happiest thinking that.

Mischkelovitz came back in, her arms laden with medical tools. She deposited them unceremoniously upon the coffee table and left again, returning next pulling a crate Lorca recognized from the hidden storage room at Memory Alpha. She adjusted the environmental controls to a lower temperature.

"Okay," she announced, seemingly to herself, and began scanning Lorca's wound. Lalana's biological camouflage field was a potent adversary when it came to scanners, but in her months of studying the lului, Mischkelovitz had devised a few tricks. By narrowing the scanner focus and targeting it at the particle level, she could scan around Lalana with enough accuracy to construct a composite image featuring a void where Lalana's cells were. Null data, in this case, was still data. She brought up a holographic display of the wound as the computer assembled the image. The way Lalana's cells were intentionally wrapped around Lorca's anatomy was very similar to how Mischkelovitz designed her implants. She could work with this.

Lorca swallowed as the image formed in the air. "Got any painkillers in your bag, doc?" Mischkelovitz ignored him. Lorca sighed slightly. "Lorca to sickbay."

"Unable to comply. Communications have been disabled."

O'Malley frowned. "Computer, enable communications."

"Unable to comply. Omega Tau protocol is active."

"Disable 'Omega Tau protocol,'" growled Lorca.

"Unable to comply."

Lorca tried an override authorization code. It did not work, Saru had already disabled Lorca's command subroutines. O'Malley tried next with the same result. While they attempted to bargain with the computer and invoke emergency protocols, Mischkelovitz stood transfixed on the image unfolding in front of her, oblivious to their efforts. Finally, O'Malley asked, "Melly?" No answer.

"Imaging complete," said the computer.

"Surgery time," declared Mischkelovitz. She started selecting instruments from the pile on the table.

There was a chorus of objections, none of which Mischkelovitz registered. Only when she turned towards Lorca with tools in hand did she realize everyone was trying to talk to her. She pressed a finger to the implant behind her ear and external sound flooded back to her. (This was the price of her implants being repaired. She now had the freedom to cut them out at a moment's notice whenever she wanted, and apparently had decided to exercise that freedom to the fullest.)

"He needs painkillers!" O'Malley shouted at her.

"We don't have any," Mischkelovitz replied.

Lalana's words were much kinder. "Then please go get some. I can maintain this position for as long as is necessary."

"I can't," said Mischkelovitz. "I need to focus, so I'm turning my implants off."

"Wait!" went O'Malley. "You can't operate without anesthetic!"

"Of course I can. I have all the tools I need."

In her mind, there was no distinction between _can_ and _should_. Lorca was reminded of the official report on the Edison incident. _When we found them, he was screaming_ , the statement from the leader of the rescue team read. _He was bisected. Lower half crushed. Left arm, too. His head was split open._ (This was the crucial line that had been repeated incorrectly as a severed head.) _She had hooked him up to some sort of makeshift recycler to circulate blood, bypassing most of the body while she worked on the brain. We tried to get her to explain what she was doing. She wouldn't answer us. When we pulled her off him, she attacked and we had to sedate her. He didn't stop screaming until we shut off the recycler._

Perhaps Mischkelovitz and Petrellovitz weren't so different after all.

The coroner's addendum provided further details: _Subject was a male, aged thirty-three, with extensive biomedical implants throughout the body to compensate for deficiencies in organ function. Many of these implants were damaged irreparably by blunt force trauma to the lower body while others were surgically harvested shortly prior to death. According to field report, these implants were used as components for a primitive life support device. A single cause of death cannot be determined. Subject was kept in a semi-alive state by external intervention with the brain marginally functional after the rest of the body entered a state of total termination. Brain death followed several hours after all other bodily functions ceased. Evidence was present of an attempt to reconstruct the damaged portion of the subject's brain on a sub-cellular level. Owing to the damage and loss of neural tissue at the site of injury and the limitations of current medical technology, it is unlikely this enterprise could have succeeded. Primary cause of death was damage to the body consistent with crushing by a large, heavy object and termination of organ functions both natural and artificial. Secondary cause of death was lack of oxygen to the brain due to disconnection from natural and artificial circulatory systems following an unsuccessful neurosurgery attempt. No trace of sedatives or anesthetics were found in the subject's system._

It was the sort of report O'Malley's division might have doctored in some way to mitigate the horrors of it, except because Mischkelovitz was not in a position of command and had acted independently, her actions were not deemed reflective of Starfleet as a whole and the report had never come to the secret branch of Investigative Services. Instead it was filed in official archives and promptly discovered by a journalist seeking to document the tragedies of the Binary Stars. The sensationalized details were then disseminated across the Federation, prompting outrage, accelerating the timetable of Mischkelovitz's medical review, and elevating that review into a full trial.

O'Malley had not read that report because he could not bring himself to know the full truth of Milosz Mischkelovitz's last moments, but he had heard the sensationalized whispers, much as he tried to avoid them. "Melly, that's—"

"Turn him over," she said, and flicked her implants off.

This was easier said than done. After a minute, Mischkelovitz got up, went to the door, and ordered Groves inside, commanding him to assist. With her implants off, she was oblivious to Groves' objections and simply waited for him to comply.

"I don't want any part of this!" Groves said. "He's a mass murderer. And—and he's _supposed_ to be dead." The look he gave Lorca felt a lot like the one that had been on Michael Burnham's face in the throne room. It hurt less on Groves' face, but it was still a painful reminder of Burnham's inability to extend Lorca any empathy.

"Please, John," said O'Malley. Groves hesitated.

"If not for Macarius, then will you do it for me?" asked Lalana.

Lorca could see Groves considering, but he was still not convinced. Lorca fixed Groves with a steady gaze and grunted out, "You think you're—better than me? Prove it."

Groves bit his lower lip and sucked at it, still hesitating, but Lorca knew he had him because while Groves talked a good game about moral relativism, deep down, Groves was a good man struggling to contextualize what that meant in a world where people did terrible things for the most altruistic of reasons. Not this world, not Lorca's universe, but the one Groves had been born and survived to adulthood in. The world where his attempt to address the injustice of his sister Faiza's death had resulted in the destruction of his family and suicide of his father.

"And get that bottle of moonshine."

This time, O'Malley did not object to Lorca's dipping into the stash, but Lalana did. "Sparingly," she implored him. "The alcohol disrupts my cells' ability to communicate."

They removed the Terran armor, cut away the fabric of the uniform underneath, and rolled Lorca over. The shift in position drew out another muffled scream. Then Mischkelovitz went to work. She was not gentle. Her movements were sharp pinpricks and she succeeded in something most agony booths could not: after several minutes of excruciating pain, Lorca passed out.

* * *

Ninety minutes into the procedure, Lalana trilled softly in concern. Groves was lying on the ground on the other side of the coffee table, reading. It took him a moment to register the sound of the trill over the incessant muttering of Mischkelovitz's ongoing dialogue with herself as she narrated her surgical progress in jumbled, malformed snippets of English and qoryan, but when he did, he recognized it as a sound of mild alarm. "What?" he asked, sounding bored.

"He is losing too much blood," said Lalana. The alcohol was interfering with her ability to bridge Lorca's wound, creating a leaky plug, and as Mischkelovitz worked to repair the wound and periodically interrupted Lalana's cellular engagement with Lorca's tissue, more blood was seeping out. The brown fabric of the couch cushions was soaked black with the stuff and a stain of deep burgundy had spread onto the carpet below.

Behind Lorca, his arms stiff and numb, O'Malley's black Terran uniform showed the evidence of blood loss much less, but he could feel the drips between the fabric and his skin, which he had optimistically hoped was his own sweat despite the temperature in Lalana's quarters having dropped several degrees. O'Malley shifted his hand so it was in Mischkelovitz's way and refused to move it until she turned her implants back on. "Huh," she noted as sound returned, "he isn't screaming."

"He passed out hours ago!" said O'Malley, wildly overestimating because it felt like time had slowed to a crawl. Though Mischkelovitz's prodding elicited a steady stream of low, uncomfortable sounds, Lorca had fallen largely silent, none of his responses for the past hour approaching any level of meaningful consciousness.

"He is losing blood, Emellia. At this rate he will only last another two hours. This will not be enough time. Please bring some blood from the medical bay."

"I can't," said Mischkelovitz.

Groves sat up and stared across the table in shock. "Did you not tell them!?" He looked at Lalana and O'Malley, neither of whom seemed to have the faintest clue. "We're in null time!"

"I am aware, I noticed the particle change," said Lalana, who did have a clue even if her face was incapable of showing it, but there was a fact she was missing.

"Not the whole ship, just the lab," clarified Groves. The lack of communications, the command lockout, Mischkelovitz's refusal to provide basic medicines—none of it was obstinance on her part. They were cut off from these provisions.

"You must turn it off," said Lalana, her tone a strangely somber drone.

Mischkelovitz shook her head. "There's no time."

Taken at face value, the statement made no sense. "Don't we have fifty hours?" asked O'Malley, remembering the computer's announcement.

"In here, yes. Not out there!"

Groves rolled his eyes. "It's not a light switch, Mac. Once it's off we can't turn it back on."

O'Malley was even more confused than before. His face twisted thoughtfully. With so many things going on he did not understand, he decided to focus on the one thing he did know how to fix. "Give him my blood," he said.

Groves shook his head. "You realize you're doing it again. Anton, Roberts, Erreran. How do you never learn? Do you just not have _any_ self-esteem? Come on! Not a single one of these jerks deserves this. Least of all this one."

"Shut up, John," hissed O'Malley through his teeth.

"Make me," said Groves, but got up and left the room. O'Malley was free to make his own bad decisions. It did not mean Groves had to stay and watch. A moment later, a repetitive thumping sound started up. Groves was bouncing his basketball against the wall in angry frustration.

"He's wrong," said Mischkelovitz as she set up the transfusion between O'Malley and Lorca.

"About what?" asked Lalana.

"Nobody deserves anything," said Mischkelovitz. "It's not about the recipient, it's about the person who gives, right?" She looked at O'Malley for confirmation.

He managed a weak smile. "That's right."

"That's why I'd do anything for you." That was the truth she had realized when Stamets and Tilly came to the lab: Lorca was never the one she was trying to save, he was merely the byproduct.

The infusion of blood began filtering into Lorca's system. As his pressure increased, it had the additional consequence of rousing him once more to this unfathomably awful nightmare when almost any other nightmare seemed preferable. He thrashed weakly as he came to with his face pressed against O'Malley's shoulder and O'Malley's arms tightened to keep him still. Lorca still felt the awful pressure of the pulse in his chest, but now it had been joined by the sensation of hundreds of needles digging into his back and a deep itch that, even if he had the strength to scratch it, would have been impossible to reach within the recesses of his own ribcage.

"Remain calm, Gabriel," Lalana said in soothing consolation. Lorca grunted an assent, followed by a guttural growl of discomfort as Mischkelovitz jammed what felt like a cattle prod against his spine. (It was only the needle of her microscopic tissue synthesizer brushing against an exposed nerve.) Lalana knocked her knuckles together in distress and tried to offer some distraction. "Macarius is giving you his blood. It is very unusual, like water."

Another sharp growl rumbled in Lorca's chest. "Rh-null," he gritted out through clenched teeth. He had looked it up after their conversation all those many weeks ago, wondering what made O'Malley's blood so special his wife felt compelled to marry him for it, and the answer had been right there in the biological data, a minor statistical quirk. He even remembered the statistic: "One in... hundred and fifty million."

"That's right," said O'Malley. "Practically an interspecies donor. D'you know, they used to call it golden blood? Most sought after in the world until they developed synthetic. Now it's only a prize to Misellians."

All of these were facts Lorca knew. It took considerable effort to reply, but he still tried. "And here I—didn't—get you—ghh!"

"Top stalking," said Mischkelovitz crossly.

Lalana tried to quell her hand-tapping, but she was having trouble managing it. It was taking most of her focus to deal with the wound. "How about a story. Macarius, will you tell us one?" O'Malley could not think of one.

"Your wife," breathed Lorca, a quiet enough exhalation that Mischkelovitz did not comment on it.

"Yes, tell us about Aeree."

"Where to begin," said O'Malley, but of course he began at the beginning. A diplomatic mission gone awry, the death of Aeree's mate by Federation representatives trying to protect themselves from a species whose bloodthirst had caused endless strife in that region of space. The struggle to reconcile the rights of an advanced, autonomous species whose evolution demanded they take something other races had no wish to give. The negotiations were at a standstill until O'Malley turned up to investigate the death and freely offered his own blood to the new leader of the Misellian delegation. "They called it a blood payment, and since I'd paid... Misellian tradition..."

O'Malley's head rolled to the side and his arms went slack. Mischkelovitz said his name, reached over, and pinched him. He sluggishly woke back up in a state of confusion. "I'm awake! What?"

Mischkelovitz was finished with Lorca's back. They rolled him over, freeing O'Malley in the process. Lorca had to do most of the movement himself; O'Malley was already reeling from his own blood loss. O'Malley apologized several times for this deficiency and attempted to resume storytelling, but after a few minutes of drifting in and out of coherency, not really managing to say anything that led anywhere, he gave up and mumbled more apologies.

The only certainty was that, while Lorca could have used more blood, O'Malley was already past what constituted a safe donation level and could contribute no more. Mischkelovitz removed the line linking them together. "I'm hungry," muttered O'Malley, getting to his feet. He made it two steps and then half-fell, half-laid down on the carpeted ground and closed his eyes with a soft mumble.

Mischkelovitz did not look up from her work. Lalana peered over at O'Malley's prone form. "Emellia, perhaps you should check on Macarius."

"It doesn't matter," said Mischkelovitz. "If I'm right, it doesn't matter."

Lalana tilted her head. "And if you are wrong?"

It was an innocent question intended only to ensure O'Malley was being looked after, but it triggered a chain of thought in Mischkelovitz that so disturbed her she stopped what she was doing, pushed away from the couch, and rolled back against the coffee table with her knees to her chin. Her jaw trembled. "If I'm wrong, then... then..." She began to cry. "Then it was all for nothing."

Lorca could have glared daggers at Lalana. "Come on, Mischka," he said, air hissing in his throat. It was a struggle to breathe and he could manage only a few words at a time. "Back to work. That's an order."

"But how am I fonna gix—fonna—fonna—fix—" She was crumbling at the worst possible moment.

"You must focus on what is in front of you," advised Lalana, which was both a fortune cookie-level aphorism and a literal truth under the circumstances. "You have made excellent progress and we are more than halfway done. I am confident you can complete this task."

"C'mere," said Lorca, opening his hand to try and entice Mischkelovitz to return. "You said... monsters gotta stick... together."

Mischkelovitz looked up. "Really? When did I say that?"

The way she said it sounded entirely rhetorical, so naturally Lalana took the question at face value and answered, "In your message from the future."

Mischkelovitz smacked herself in the face with the palm of her hand repeatedly. It was the only way she could express her frustration at the fact neither Lalana nor Lorca seemed to understand what she was saying. "You—idiots—there are two Discoveries!"

She had said that before, at the beginning of this venture.

"What does this have to do with the other Discovery?" asked Lalana.

"Because you can't change history!" she wailed.

At the mention of history, Lorca realized Mischkelovitz was not talking about the ISS Discovery captained by his universe's Sylvia Tilly. She was talking about the version of herself that had instigated the timeline changes. The remnant, Allan called it. "Mischka," he rasped at her. "You did something impossible. Sent a message back in time to save me."

Mischkelovitz shook her head and wiped at her tears. "That's not why I did it."

"Course it is," said Lorca, managing a desperate smile. It hurt to talk, a lot, but he had to get her back on task. "Other you—said so."

"Did you watch the whole message, then?" asked Lalana, thinking this was a part of the message she had not heard because Allan had only played the first part.

The recording was still in Lorca's pocket along with Allan's tooth. Before Lorca could raise any objection, Lalana plucked the little silver disc from Lorca's pants pocket with two fingers.

Mischkelovitz gasped. Her excitement momentarily stemmed the flow of tears and she scrambled forward and snatched the disc from Lalana. "How does it work?"

"Wait—"

"You flick so it spins up in the air."

"Like this?" asked Mischkelovitz. She got it on the first try.

A perfect hologram of an older Mischkelovitz appeared in front of them. "Hello, Lan. It's me, Melly."

The message began to play. Lorca was helpless to stop it. He could only listen in horror as the elder Mischkelovitz asked a favor from John Allan, talked about how they had to keep history the same while making tiny changes to it, talked about her actions ending her own existence, and declared herself unable to save anyone. Then she outlined the two changes she wanted to make, which he knew entailed the Triton encountering Lalana and a batch of spores contaminated with chronitons triggering the first null time incident, but the specifics of her instructions turned out to be exceedingly odd, because she told Allan to find Captain Chaudhuri and "induce a state of Mischka in the winter" and then "put bells and whistles in the broken pots that time the lights went out." No wonder Allan had not played that part of the message back on the Charon. These seemed to be coded missives only he would understand.

Nowhere in this little message did she say anything about saving Lorca's life. If anything, she seemed to be expressly counseling against it by insisting on the integrity of the timeline and history.

Mischkelovitz watched the message all the way through to the end and then played it again.

"Mischka—" tried Lorca, prepared to bargain for his life.

"Shh!" After the message finished playing for the second time, Mischkelovitz whirled on Lorca and Lalana with half-crazed eyes and exclaimed, "It's perfect! I wonder how many iterations it went through? I didn't even get the important part of the message and I still figured it out!"

"What is the important part?" asked Lalana.

"I can't save anyone!"

The delight in her eyes as she looked at Lorca with this revelation was bone-chilling. They were halfway through a surgery that felt like being ripped open, torn into tiny little pieces, and having the pieces melted back together and hammered into place. His life depended on her finishing the job or Lalana keeping her tail in the wound until someone else turned up who would. Assuming Mischkelovitz did not interpret her future self's words as a command to murder him to preserve history.

Seeing the fear on Lorca's face, Mischkelovitz laughed gaily. "Don't you see? I can't save anyone! I can't save _anyone!_ " Her laughter overcame her. After a solid minute of hysterics, she wheezed and gasped and returned to a state approaching normalcy.

"Mischka," Lorca tried again, voice hopeful and enticing, because surely, after everything he had given her, she felt he was someone worth saving. "Hear me out. I'm sure we can... reach an understanding."

Mischkelovitz grinned. "Don't you see, captain? In our universe, you're no one. Literally!" Now her tears were happy, glistening in the low light like starlight on her eyelids. "Captain no one!"

Lalana caught the pun because it was exactly the sort of dual-layered, overly literal phrasing she herself frequently employed. Her hands spun with pleasure. "Captain Lorca always loves the stars, no matter who he is and where he is from, because when he was a child, his mother told him the sky was an ocean, just like in his favorite—"

"Bedtime story," breathed Lorca, eyes wide. A week ago, he had suggested Lalana tell Mischkelovitz a story and Lalana had asked him what story she should tell. _Your favorite_. A story about a dead man who had gone to the stars in search of adventure because of a captain called Nemo—a name that, in Latin, meant "no one."

Mischkelovitz was saying that the words "I can't save anyone" meant "I can save no one," and in her mind at least, those two words described him.

Her mind being the crucial element here. Either this was the greatest instance of talking on two levels in all of creation or she was twisting every detail of the message to mean what she wanted it to. So long as her agenda remained saving him, he didn't care which.

"Genius," he said, smirking in satisfaction.

"That is exceptionally clever," said Lalana. (Unlike Lorca, she accepted Mischkelovitz's assertion as to the true meaning of the message.)

"The important thing is, you have to _be_ no one, or else everything she did—" Mischkelovitz stopped, her face twisting into a question. "He—he gave you the message?"

Allan had not given it to Lorca so much as had it pried from his cold, dead hands. The way Mischkelovitz phrased it could only mean one thing:

No one had told her Allan was dead.

Lorca didn't miss a beat. "He wanted you to have it," he rasped. "Told me to bring it to you." Lalana knew this was a lie and forced herself to remain still to avoid betraying anything through hand cues.

The lie on Lorca's face would have been painfully obvious to almost anyone else, but Mischkelovitz, with her limited social experience, failed to detect it. Instead, she visibly brightened. Of course Allan wanted her to have the message! Groves was wrong, Allan _was_ a genius. By giving her the message when and how he had, he ensured she received it at just the right moment to capitalize on its contents without exposing himself. He had probably figured out qoryan by listening to it, too. "There are... There are _two_ Discoveries. And—and I can save both of you! _I can save both of you!_ " She grabbed the tissue regenerator and dove back to work with such gusto, Lorca yelled at the sudden wave of pain.

"Emellia, be careful!" chided Lalana. Lorca mumbled a demand for more alcohol. This time, Lalana provided it to him without comment and Mischkelovitz resumed her work.

Little by little, Lalana's tail emerged from the wound, covered in patches of brown discoloration. Whole sections of filaments lay limp and unresponsive. "The alcohol and your immune system," Lalana explained. If he were a better man, Lorca might have apologized for the effects the alcohol was having on her cells, but he felt no remorse. That precious bottle was the closest thing to medicine he had under the circumstances. He did, at least, refrain from any further drinking until her tail was out completely. Then he took a celebratory swig, even though his head was already reeling and the alcohol was only making him even weaker given the state of his blood.

The important thing was the wound was sealed. The odyssey was over and he was alive. Lorca closed his eyes and inhaled as deeply as he could manage, feeling an aching tightness in his chest in response. Beside him, Lalana pruned away unsalvageable cells from her tail, sloughing off patches of cellular material that melted into puddles of oily sludge on the glassy surface of the coffee table.

While Lorca and Lalana's post-operative states could be described as restful—and O'Malley's enduring state of unconsciousness was entirely so—Mischkelovitz became a flurry of activity. She sifted through the contents of the Memory Alpha crate. "Particle charge, particle charge," she muttered to herself, and went to unhook one of the larger exterior wall panels.

Lalana's reaction was violent and immediate. She trilled in alarm and slapped her tail over her eyes. "It is too bright!" Lorca tilted his head up and saw rows of glowing blue tubes running through the wall. Mycelium spores, frozen in place, not drifting around the way they did during jumps. He had missed the discussion on what the Omega Tau protocol was, but he figured it out easily enough from the evidence in front of him.

To his Terran eyes, the gentle glow of the chroniton-laden spores seemed unremarkable. To Lalana, it was like looking directly at a supernova, a hundred thousand times brighter than the halo of particles that lingered on time travelers and a million times worse than the faint haze that characterized her previous null time experiences. For once, her ability to see more than humans was not an advantage. It was akin to the sharp pain Lorca had struggled with in the overly-bright universe of Discovery's origin. Her fur writhed in discomfort as she trilled, "I cannot!" and jumped lengthwise across the couch, huddling in the shelter of the far side of the couch a moment before making a run for the door and fleeing to the forward section of the lab.

"What the hell are you up to," groaned Lorca, voice barely above a whisper.

"I'm setting up a mycelial transport," Mischkelovitz said, connecting a set of cables to the spore tubes in the wall and running them over to the coffee table.

Suddenly the differences between Mischkelovitz and Petrellovitz seemed entirely superficial. Lorca's eyes widened and he rolled upright with a grimace, gripping the arm of the couch tightly for support. His voice was firm, brimming with anger. "No." He tried to grab her arm and crashed down against the arm of the couch, head spinning. Mischkelovitz jumped back in surprise.

"Stay still! I need you alive for this," she exclaimed.

"Then stop trying to kill me!" he barked, wincing as the angry shout triggered the sensation of being punched in the chest.

After so many months of Lorca's coddling, Mischkelovitz was taken aback by the visage of his wrath. He felt so dark and sharp it terrified her. She tightened her grip on the cables. Some instinct told her his mask had slipped and this was a piece of his true face. It was as if he was holding a knife just below the surface of the water and all she could see was the reflection of the sky until a ripple came along and showed her the glint of the blade hidden below.

She stood, clinging to the cables and trembling, but her fear was accompanied by something else far more potent: pity for the poor, scared, angry refugee from another universe who did not understand what she was doing or why. The pity won out as she asked him softly, "What happened to you?"

Of all the things she could possibly feel for him, pity was by far the worst. Lorca looked away, sneering at the indignity. She was supposed to be the pitiful one, the broken thing, the wounded bird who needed his help. Except the bird had mended and was now soaring high above him, looking down and seeing him for what he truly was: a wingless, earthbound creature whose lot it was to live and die in the mud.

"Can I tell you a story?" she asked. Lorca did not respond. Mischkelovitz sat down on the ground next to O'Malley. "Once upon a time," she said, which was not how this story began, but was a good way to begin a story, "there was a girl named Margot who lived on the planet Venus where it always rains, every day and all day long. It rained so much that none of the children on Venus had ever seen the sun except for Margot. She was born on Earth and she remembered it from when she was young, but when she tried to tell everyone about it, they laughed at her, nobody believed her. Every seven years, the magnetosphere of Venus would align in such a way that the rains stopped and the sun would come out for a single hour..."

Some details were perhaps misremembered and a few specifics invented on the spot, but it was spiritually a faithful retelling of _All Summer in a Day_. As Mischkelovitz recounted the ostracization and confinement of Margot by the other children, who locked her in a closet and forgot about her while they marveled in the single hour of the sun, it felt like it was Mischkelovitz's story as much as it was Margot's.

In Mischkelovitz's version, the end of the story was this:

"They opened the door and let her out, but they didn't look at her and she didn't look at them. So deep was their betrayal, she cried as much as the rain. But because it was raining, no one could see her tears." Neither of them was certain whether this was a happy ending, least of all Mischkelovitz.

Lorca sighed. It was a nice enough little story, but nothing had changed. "You're not beamin' me anywhere with those spores."

"Obviously not, they're quantum-locked. You're not—you're not the target, captain, you're the template."

An eyebrow raised. "Come again?"

Something in Mischkelovitz came alive. Her eyes went wide with excitement and she broke into an exuberant smile. "There are two Discoveries. The same particles exist in both quantum realities, in a state of... let's call it entangled flux. I'm going to use the atoms in this universe to trigger a reaction in the other. Because they're _the same atoms_ , so they share a resonance. Now, the spores on this side are locked in a null time field, but the spores on the other side aren't." She reached into her pocket and pulled out a piece from a puzzle—one of the pieces missing from the puzzle in the mess hall. "Every particle in the universe fits together in a single configuration at any given point in time. Because the spores permeate into every corner of reality, they're like the table supporting all the pieces of the puzzle."

Recalling O'Malley's warning about the reactor, Lorca decided to look into the issue of the mycelial network before the table in Mischkelovitz's analogy collapsed and dumped all the pieces of reality into a jumble on the floor. For a moment, he even entertained the idea this was a problem he and Burnham could tackle together. Then the grim memory of her betrayal returned and the expression on his face shifted to a look of sour disgust that would have gotten him executed at one of Georgiou's banquets.

The spores also have the ability to rearrange the puzzle pieces. They lift one piece up and swap it with another." She moved the puzzle piece through the air in a hopping motion. "That's mycelial transport. That's why we switched places with the other Discovery when we jumped. It switched our puzzle piece with theirs. But this isn't about transferring matter between universes, this is about _translating_ information—telling the mycelial network in one quantum state that it should adjust its configuration to match our state. In other words, triggering a remote mycelial transport via induced atomic synchronicity. The spores just need the pattern of what they're going to be transporting. That's you. You're the pattern. This is how I save you."

She looked so beautiful in that moment, full of hope, and Lorca could see the same light O'Malley did. The only thing he did not see was why any of it was necessary. He smiled at her benevolently. "You already saved me."

Mischkelovitz's hair bobbed around her ears as she shook her head. There were tears forming again, sad and happy at the same time. "No, I didn't. It was all her, the other me. She saw Margot was crying and found a way to slip a key under the door in secret so the other children wouldn't see—but the person she gave the key to wasn't her Margot, he was mine. She did all this to save my Margot, to create a timeline where Margot didn't cry. But it turns out, I can save her Margot, too. I can make it so Margot never has to cry in any timeline."

Lorca lost the thread of her logic somewhere in the middle and squinted in thought. She was saying he was Margot? Scratching his chin, Lorca glanced at the motionless spores in the wall. They weren't exactly hurting for time. "How long is this gonna take exactly?"

"Just trust me," said Mischkelovitz. "I've seen the sun."

She worked quickly, hooking together various components, hopping over O'Malley's body as she moved between the couch and the wall. Lorca leaned back against the couch and watched her, a hand resting over the gash in his chest. It was a relief to feel the rise and fall of his own chest.

Apropos of nothing, Mischkelovitz suddenly asked, "Are you right or left-handed?"

"Right, mostly," he answered. She picked up a dermal probe and jammed it through the fabric of his shirt and into the flesh of his right shoulder, below the collarbone. He yelped in annoyed discomfort as the metal prongs bit into his skin. She really had zero bedside manner. "The hell!"

"In case the electromagnetic field doesn't extend the whole way," she explained. "There might not be enough power to translate you all the way down to your feet, but this should increase the likelihood the other you gets his dominant hand." She returned to assembling some sort of particle ray on the coffee table.

That was a cheery thought. Lorca tried to decide if he cared whether some other version of himself had all his appendages. He didn't, but he cared a lot about keeping all his appendages in this universe. He tried again to put an end to this folly. "Are you sure you know what you're doing? That message you sent wasn't very clear."

"Nonsense, it was as clear as could be. It had to be secret enough no one else would understand what it said."

"So why not just send the message to yourself in qoryan? Make sure there were no misunderstandings." The implication being her entire course of action right now was one massive, massive misunderstanding.

"Because no one would deliver a message they didn't know the contents of. Computer, protocol status."

"Field integrity at seventy-six percent. Power reserves at ninety-one percent."

She picked up the particle ray from the table and set it up pointing at the spores in the wall. "Peroute rower fruh—reroute power from storage modules A, B, and D to conduit 9-5-3-3-B." The computer reported compliance. Mischkelovitz turned the ray on. A beam of yellow energy shot out towards the wall. It was bright enough that Lorca looked away.

She returned to the couch and sat down next to Lorca with her chin on her knees, hugging her arms around her legs. He finally saw a flicker of doubt in her face.

"You gonna tell me what that is?" he asked.

"One of Lieutenant Commander Kumar's ideas."

Lorca frowned. As he recalled, all of Kumar's null time ideas had been shot down by the rest of the scientists in the room as being dangerously bad. "Not the one that causes the... cascade?"

She nodded.

Maybe Mischkelovitz had seen the sun, but staring directly at the sun could blind you. "You don't have to do this," he said.

"You want to know a secret? It was a trick. Everyone thought we could finish each other's sentences like we had one brain. How stupid is that? We were feeding each other lines through our implants. I should've told Mally and Rove after Losz died, but I didn't. I didn't want to share that with anyone else. It was our secret. Then I found out there was another me, and I thought maybe... But she poisoned Einar. What kind of person does that?"

"The kind of person who can't cry," offered Lorca.

She understood then what he'd meant back when he said this version of her was best, tears and all, and she smiled. He had given her so many gifts—kindnesses to manipulate her—and she appreciated his admiration for her tears most of all. "The other me can cry. That's why she did all this, because she didn't want anyone else to have to cry. That's the sort of person I want to be two people with."

She fell quiet. They watched the particle ray striking the spores. The spores were shifting in color from blue to green. Lorca supposed it was too late to stop whatever she was doing.

"Gabriel?"

He glanced over at her. She was no longer watching the spores transition in color. She was looking down at O'Malley.

"Call me Melly and tell me you love me."

Lorca hesitated. They were just words, but he did not want her getting the wrong idea.

"Please?"

He managed. "I love you, Melly."

She smiled, tears forming in her eyes, as they always did. "Just as much!" she said. "Will you tell Mally that when he wakes up? 'Just as much!'"

It suddenly struck Lorca that she was not asking him to call her Melly because she loved him. She wanted to hear it said aloud one more time. "Why..." He took a breath. "Why can't you tell him?"

"Because I have to send me a message. The right message in order to make sure this works again. I'm the only one who can."

" _Mischka_ ," Lorca said in stern admonition. She was clearly leaving something out.

"My whole life, nobody has ever really understood what I was saying except Mischka. The other me understands what I'm saying, and she lost him, too. That means there's no one who understands her, either. But I do. So I'll transfer my neural parge chattern into my implant and synchronize it with hers."

Though Lorca was unclear what this process actually entailed, he understood the most crucial part. "That's suicide."

"No, it isn't," she said, "because I'll still be alive over there. It'll be more like Ash Tyler, when he had the pattern of another person in his head."

She had that in reverse. Voq was the physical person, Tyler was the neural pattern. Tyler was in a very real sense dead and had been for months and months.

Lorca looked down at O'Malley's unmoving form. Whatever O'Malley's connection to Lorca, it completely paled in comparison to what he felt for his sister. Lorca had to stop Mischkelovitz. "Listen to me. Whatever is in that other universe, it's not worth sacrificing anyone in this one." Some part of him still did not think there was another universe, despite her assertions. "Use yourself as a template, like you're doing with me."

The tears rolled down her cheeks. "But that would just create me as I am. I don't want that. I want to be two people again. Maybe this way I can be. Not me and Mischka, but me and myself."

"You are two people," he tried with a smile of encouragement, though he knew it was not true. "Melly and Mally."

"I love Mally, but he doesn't think like I do. He never has. He can't."

Lorca knew how much this would hurt O'Malley. He knew because it would hurt at least as much as losing Michael had hurt for him. "You're going to destroy him."

Mischkelovitz wiped her arm across her face and smiled at Lorca. "If I don't do this, it'll destroy him. At least this way, you can fix him. You can fix anyone. You're even better at it than I am."

It took all the strength he could muster to raise his arm and brush the tears on her cheek and then his hand fell right back down. "Some things can't be fixed," he said.

"Anything can be fixed if you have enough time!"

 _And if you don't have enough time, look to space._ Lorca stared at her, vaguely despondent. Mischkelovitz had manifested Michael's words in a very real way. "Don't do this. It's insane, and that's saying a lot coming from me." He was, despite everything, trying to make a joke in the middle of all this.

Mischkelovitz brightened. "It _is_ insane. That's the definition of love!" She smirked in quiet laughter and kicked her legs out, swinging them down and bouncing her feet on the side of the couch.

"I'm not gonna take care of your brother for you," Lorca warned her.

"He'll take care of you," she replied in kind. "Computer, disengage power modules A, B, and D."

The particle beam turned off. "Power reserves at twenty-three percent," reported the computer.

All the spores visible in the wall were green now. Mischkelovitz picked up a transmitter from the mess of objects on the table, connecting one end of it to the implant behind her right ear and the other to the line running between the couch and the wall. They were both hooked into the line now.

Lorca gave up. There was nothing he could say to convince her. She was twisting everything to fit what she wanted it to mean, just like she had the contents of the future message.

"There is one last thing," said Mischkelovitz. "Something I've always wanted to do. May I?" She held up her right hand. He had no idea what she intended.

She reached out, pressed her hand lightly against his forehead, then dragged her hand down across his face, sort of smearing her fingers and the top of her palm across his features. Lorca's face scrunched in confusion and Mischkelovitz began to laugh hysterically.

"That was—that was—that was amazing!" she laughed, almost falling over. He realized she had done the sort of thing babies do when seeing adult faces up close for the first time. She was, right to the end, utterly childish. "I'll see you on the other side." She took a handheld trigger from the table and turned to look at O'Malley one last time. Her brother remained oblivious to her, but she told him, "And I'll see you, too. Computer, end Omega Tau protocol on a fifteen second countdown. Authorization Mischkelovitz-9-5-8-5-1."

The countdown began. "My only regret," said Mischkelovitz, "is that I didn't get to tell Lan how much I love him. I think he loves me, too."

Talk about out of left field. "He does," said Lorca, because there was no other conceivable reason Allan would have done any of it.

"When you see him, give him this," she said, even though it was definitely going to be an impossible request. She leaned forward and kissed Lorca.

Their lips were still touching as her thumb pressed down on the trigger. There was a tiny pop. The computer's countdown ended a half second later.

One moment Mischkelovitz was there and the next she was gone. She slumped forward onto Lorca's chest, her eyes unfocusing and breath hissing out from her mouth. For the first time, her pupils were even as they stared lifelessly up at him, dilated to the fullest extent possible. Lorca tried to shout for Lalana and Groves but did not have the lung capacity.

He remembered a thought from watching her on the monitors so many months ago. There was something beautiful in the brokenness. That had not gone away. If anything, she was even more beautiful now.


	96. Nowhere and Everywhere

A/N: This concludes the events of episode 13, "What's Past is Prologue." I swear on my life we're almost done. Five chapters remain.

For the record, I think the difference in cranial size makes the show concept referenced in this chapter one of the least credulous "twists" in TV history because brain matter. Where did it go. Was it compressed? How did that not show up on a scan? It's _brain matter!_ How do you not end up with a drooling mess when you compress or remove brain matter? Surely there's a difference in the neurological structures between species that shows up on a _brain scan_... /rant

* * *

Lalana found Groves asleep in the front of the lab, his head resting on his basketball, a line of drool trailing down onto the metal surface of Mischkelovitz's desk. She considered waking him, updating him as to the status of things in the other room, but she decided to sit in Mischkelovitz's chair and watch him sleep instead. Dreaming fascinated her. It was not an action lului had the capacity to do. She wondered what thoughts were running through Groves' head. Many times she had watched her Gabriel Lorca sleep, and sometimes, when he woke, he even remembered what he had been dreaming and described it when she asked.

Eventually Groves stirred, wiping the drool from the corner of his mouth as he sat up. "Hey," he said in greeting. "You want some tea?"

The delicate aroma of the pu-erh tantalized the surface of her cells as it brewed. It really was no different to any other foodstuff from her perspective, but the hot temperature was reason enough for her to enjoy the experience of drinking it. "Perhaps you could bring Gabriel a cup."

"Nuh uh, I'm not brewing this for him."

"It is a shame you two do not get along. You are so alike."

Groves snorted. "You realize that's an insult."

"Not to me it is not."

He poured out Lalana's cup first, piping hot, and then his own, which he left sitting on the table to cool. She dipped her tongue into the scalding hot liquid, absorbing the mixture of tea particles and water. She could have, if she wanted, strained out the particles of tea from the water, or the reverse.

Groves leaned over his cup and breathed into it, letting the steam wash over his face. "So," he said, settling down into his chair. "They kick you out, too, or have you finally had enough of all the bullshit?"

Lalana tapped her fingers and let her tail drift back and forth like a stalk of wheat in the wind. "I will never have enough of it for as long as I live."

"That's a long time."

Her tongue clicked. "Yes, it is!"

They sat in silence, sipping tea. Groves noticed Lalana's padd on the workbench. Just prior to Lorca and O'Malley's arrival, Lalana had come out from her quarters with the padd saying she had noticed something unusual. "What was that thing you wanted to show me earlier?"

"Oh! There was a glitch in Brig Chess." Lalana pressed her tail against the padd, turning it on, but the program did not load. It stalled out on a "no connection available" screen. Brig Chess resided in the central computer core, which they were presently cut off from.

"Probably just wear and tear on your padd," said Groves. The fault had to lie in the hardware because Brig Chess was a perfectly coded program. "If you wanna play a game, maybe we can, I dunno, use some of Melly's junk as chess pieces?" There were plenty of bits and bobs around, the scattered remnants of Mischkelovitz's many forays into cloak detection research.

"I would rather not, I am still recovering from helping Gabriel and I do not feel up to a game. It is very taxing, redirecting internal resources to affected cellular regions."

Groves hummed in disinterest, unsympathetic to the lului's self-inflicted plight, and looked over at the door to Lalana's quarters. "She about done in there?"

"Emellia has finished with the surgery and is now working with the spores in the wall. That is why I left. It was too bright to look at the spores directly. Like a halo of supernovas."

"What's she doing?"

"Something involving particle charge. She became very excited about it after we watched the message from her future self."

The veil of disinterest lifted. Groves sat straight up and spilled a small quantity of tea onto his leg in the process, wiping at the liquid hot spot with his hand to distract from the faintly scalding sensation as he abandoned his cup. "We have the message?"

"Yes. Gabriel has it. If you like, I am sure they would let you see the message, too."

Groves considered that. "Eh." He shrugged. There were still forty hours left on Mischkelovitz's protocol and whatever tea party was going on in the next room was not one he had an interest in joining. Not while he had a perfectly good cup to finish out here. "In a bit. We got plenty of time to kill!"

Lalana's eyes glinted mischievously as she asked, "Will this be first- or second-degree murder?"

"Neither. I'll represent us. Guaranteed acquittal."

Lalana clicked her tongue and rolled back on her haunches, recalling a conversation with the original Lorca. "I doubt they have a murder sentence long enough to be truly punitive to me."

"Yeah, but you've got money! They could always go after damages. Take your ship, for example."

The clicking ceased and Lalana gripped the back of Mischkelovitz's chair and curled her tail around it. "I am very much looking forward to being back on my ship." Saru's shipwide announcement regarding the possibility of jumping back on the wave of the mycelial reactor's destruction had given everyone something to look forward to. There were still particles of the other Gabriel Lorca present in the dusty corners of the Gabriella. "Though, it will mean that Gabriel becomes no one again. Do you know, Emellia said the message was about saving Gabriel the whole time? Apparently, the words 'I can't save anyone' were a reference to Captain Nemo."

Squinting thoughtfully, Groves said, "Huh, yeah. In qoryan, that'd be 'no one can be saved.' And, well, nemo est supra leges! Geez, now that's got a double meaning, too. Wait. Why's he Captain Nemo?" Groves jabbed his thumb towards Lalana's door.

"Because Gabriel's favorite book is _Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea_ , he is a captain, and in our universe, he is also no one."

If Groves had still been holding his cup, he would have dropped it. His jaw went slack.

Lalana watched the spreading despair on Groves' face. "What is wrong, John?"

"We're..." He worked it over in his head again to be sure. Allan thought the timeline had corrected itself and expected Lorca to die. If history said Lorca lived, this whole timeline would become a manifest paradox. "We're the remnant. Oh, god. It's us." He covered his mouth with his hand. The only thing keeping them extant was the null time bubble.

Lalana pressed her knuckles together. "I do not think that is the case." Allan might have been lying when he said the message was the remnant, but Lalana was looking at this from the perspective of a lului, which told her something very different.

"Unless!" snapped Groves, jerking his finger into the air. "History stays the same." His every word was punctuated with determined intensity. He dropped his gaze away from Lalana, ruminating a moment, then grabbed the padd from the table and opened Brig Chess.

The main chess program remained inaccessible, but Groves didn't need the main program. He just needed the initialization skin on the padd. He began to program a series of commands to automatically trigger once the padd's connection to the central database was restored.

"What are you doing?" asked Lalana, leaning forward and peering over the top of the padd. From her perspective, Groves was programming upside-down, but she had no difficulty reading the letters on the screen at this angle, even if she did not understand what all the numbers and symbols meant.

"Everything must go," declared Groves. "Anything that'd clue a historian into what's going on. All the footage in the lab since we got here, all the footage in the hallway... Too obvious. I'll wipe it all. Just make it look like a... power surge. Burn up all the security footage and backups since our last data transmit."

This suited Lalana just fine because it proved the thing she had been suspecting for a while now: once the deed was done, it was done. They had been past the point of no return from the moment she encountered the Triton. None of them could see the bigger picture in the moment, but they were all pieces who had been moved into place by someone who could. Someone with a very long perspective indeed.

The issue of the security feeds was now solved, but not the source of the problem. Groves put the padd down. "Listen. I have to tell you something. You're not gonna like it. That man in there? He is a threat to our entire existence. If we don't get rid of him, and someone finds out he's not dead?" Groves brought both his hands up and imitated an explosion. "Poof! We vanish in a paradox. He can't be alive."

"Then I will make sure he is dead," said Lalana.

Groves blinked. He had expected at least _some_ pushback to his latest time travel murder proposal. "So, how do you wanna do it? Phaser or some sort of injection... Vent the atmosphere?" He shuddered at the thought and realized if they were going to do this, he was not going to be the one to pull the trigger.

Lalana clicked her tongue. "There is no need. We have a perfectly good dead body just outside."

Einar Larsson. She was proposing they pass off Larsson as Lorca. "You don't understand. If he's walking around—"

"I understand perfectly. My mission is clear. I must make sure history believes Gabriel Lorca is dead. I know I can do this because I have already done it. If I had not, we would not be having this conversation."

It was partly true. Time was a flat circle, nonlinear, all points happening at once, except right now, they were in a bubble that was not permitting information to escape. Once the bubble popped, either Lalana was right, or they were all dead. No, not dead. Nonexistent.

Groves had questioned the value of existence for most of his life. A few times, the answers had been force-fed him by O'Malley and others who found existence worthwhile and insisted he fall into line with their values. He acquiesced not because he agreed, but because he wanted them to be right and to figure out whatever it was everyone else saw in life that made it so worthwhile and meaningful. Thirty-seven years of enduring futility. Now that he found himself suddenly confronted by the end of all the futility—potentially forever—he did not want it to end. He wasn't even sure _why_ , just that he desperately wanted to stay alive and keep existing. Maybe just to prove he could.

There was one big problem with Lalana's idea, emphasis on the big. Larsson's size was unmistakable. "No one's gonna believe Einar is Lorca."

"They will when I am done with his body."

"Oh, god," said Groves, covering his mouth again, this time to fight the liquid bile rising at the horror of her suggestion. Blood drained from his skin, turning him an ashy brown. "He's your best friend!"

"He is," said Lalana. "He was dying, John. At least this way his death has served a purpose."

It was perfect lului logic Groves still struggled with it. "You used him," he said in a small voice.

"I did, but because we loved each other, he was happy to be used. It was of benefit to us both."

Groves shook his head. Was that what love was supposed to be? He realized he didn't know. He still wanted no part of this, but if this was the price of preserving reality, then he had to pay it. The alternative was unthinkable in a wholly literal and terrifying sense.

Out of nowhere, the computer said, "Fifteen. Fourteen. Thirteen..."

Groves startled. "Computer!"

"I think it is time," said Lalana, hopping down from Mischkelovitz's chair and pushing it aside to access the passage into the wall. "I will go and fetch Gabriel's hair dye. Please inform him of what we must do and bring Einar's body inside." She ducked into the wall and disappeared as the countdown ended.

The prospect of dragging Larsson inside was daunting. Groves grimaced and went to the interior door to ask for help.

The scene that awaited him was not what he expected. Lorca, alert and propped upright, and Mischkelovitz collapsed into a twisted lump in his arms. O'Malley slumped on the floor next to the coffee table. Cables running from the couch to the wall and an exposed wall panel revealing tubes filled with the remnants of what had to be _Prototaxites stellaviatori_ spores, but they were green instead of blue.

Even stranger, Lorca looked relieved to see Groves. "Get Melly to sickbay," he ordered.

"Don't call her—"

"Now!" barked Lorca, gasping at the resulting pain.

Groves lifted Mischkelovitz up as easily as a paper butterfly, his eyes widening at the sensation of dead weight in his arms.

The comms sounded. "Bridge to O'Malley. What's your status?"

"Don't answer," hissed Groves to Lorca, then shouted, "Can't talk! Call back later. Groves out." The comm cut off and he started towards the door. "You say anything to _anyone_ and we're all dead! Got it?" He did not wait for a response and went tearing out of the room.

Lorca sat there, mildly amused by Groves' outburst. This was not ideal, but once he cleared everything up with Saru, Discovery would realize helping Lorca was its best chance at surviving in this universe. They would rally Lorca's supporters and cement control of the Charon. Then he could get back to what was really important: executing Georgiou. Burnham was going to feel like a total idiot once she heard the truth about the emperor. Let her, he decided. She needed to know there were consequences for betraying him.

A minute later, Groves was back. "What the hell! She has a heartbeat, but..." He shook his head back and forth in denial. Zero neural activity.

"Mally," prompted Lorca.

Groves grumbled in qoryan—it sounded to Lorca like swearing—but managed. O'Malley was not much bigger than his sister.

The lights suddenly shifted and the computer calmly intoned, "Black alert, black alert."

"Shit," said Groves.

"Stamets?" asked Lorca, because last he knew, Discovery was incapable of performing any spore jumps owing to the incapacitation of its mycelial-modified navigator.

Groves ignored Lorca as he headed towards the door. "Computer! Override all Lab 26 operational protocols to my voiceprint only. Authorization Game..."

The door slid shut. Lorca stared a moment, a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach, then slid his legs down from the couch to the floor. "Lorca to bridge." No response. "Computer, status report." Nothing. Lorca got up from the couch, fighting the reeling sensation in his head, and used the coffee table as support to reach the door. He hit the controls. Nothing again.

Discovery shuddered under an impact and Lorca half-slid, half-fell to the floor. He was trapped, just like the little girl in Mischkelovitz's story.

* * *

The command to access the system override turned out to be a sequence of attempted moves on the Brig Chess practice game screen. Petrellovitz found the sequence buried in the middle of the program's code and intentionally mislabeled. Up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, commit, cancel. She executed the code through the program's interface and just like that, she was into Discovery's data.

The first thing she looked for was important information. The most highly-guarded files, the secrets coded for the captain's eyes only, and anything that had high levels of encryption. There were plenty of files about the spore drive to parse. Petrellovitz skimmed past them. She hardly needed instruction on how to conduct mycelial transports.

There was a file about her neighbor in the brig that made for some interesting reading. Normally Petrellovitz had little regard for the medical sciences, steeped as they were in interpersonal interaction, but this one represented a real threat to the Terran Empire. Aliens capable of disguising themselves as humans well enough to fool medical sensors. Disgusting.

Also potentially useful. Petrellovitz did a mental reassessment of the Klingon woman, willing to admit L'Rell was a scientist worthy of some begrudging respect for her accomplishments in this area.

She also accessed her own personnel log. It took a moment to locate because her counterpart's surname was "Mischkelovitz," but her given name was still "Emellia." When Petrellovitz opened the file, she found her own face looking back at her, entirely unblemished, and could not help but stare in dead-eyed wonder. Stranger still, this "Mischkelovitz" had been married—to "Milosz Mischkelovitz," who could only be Milosz Mieszała.

Petrellovitz's memories of Milosz were of a depraved, perverse, cruel boy who had given her all her early scars. They had been bitter rivals up until the moment of Milosz's death. She missed him sometimes. Hating him had been the highlight of her childhood.

Petrellovitz's foray into the "what ifs" of her counterpart's life was interrupted by the sensation of Discovery dropping out of warp and firing its weapons. She switched to the bridge log and read through the action. It was a little dry absent the sharp tones of command under pressure; the computer rendered every line with only the most basic punctuation.

[OPS] LTJG OWOSEKUN: Sir, incoming emergency transport.  
[CMD] CDR SARU: Is it Burnham?  
[OPS] LTJG OWOSEKUN: No. It's the colonel, and... The containment field is still up.  
[CMD] CDR SARU: Mr. Bryce, find out O'Malley's status.  
[COMM] LTJG BRYCE: Yes, sir. Bridge to Transporter Room 1.  
[OPS] LTJG OWOSEKUN: Sir. Burnham did it. The containment field is down.  
[CMD] CDR SARU: Get her back, now.  
[OPS] LTJG OWOSEKUN: I can't get a lock, captain. I'm working on it.  
[CMD] CDR SARU: Work faster. Mr. Rhys, torpedo status.  
[TACT] LT RHYS: Armed and ready to launch.  
[COMM] LTJG BRYCE: Copy. Bridge to O'Malley. What's your status?  
[OPS] LTJG OWOSEKUN: Detecting a comm signal. I've got her.  
[CMD] CDR SARU: Get her out of there now.  
[OPS] LTJG OWOSEKUN: She's onboard.  
[CMD] CDR SARU: Black alert!  
[ENG] CDR AIRIAM: Aye, captain.  
[OPS] LTJG OWOSEKUN: The Terran ship is targeting us, sir.  
[CMD] CDR SARU: It's now or never, Lt. Detmer.  
[NAV] LT DETMER: Aye, captain.  
[TACT] LT RHYS: Locked on, captain.  
[CMD] CDR SARU: Fire all three.  
[TACT] LT RHYS: Aye, sir.  
[CMD] CDR SARU: Warp speed, now.  
[NAV] LT DETMER: Yes, sir.

There was a tremendous shudder as Discovery was racked by a series of concussive bursts. Not weapons fire, waves of energy from an explosion. The whole ship shuddered and shook.

Then the spore drive engaged. Petrellovitz felt the hairs on her arm stand up. She had never experienced mycelial transport firsthand, Georgiou had captured her before she had the chance, and she was thrilled to finally have the chance. She switched over to the data stream from the engineering lab. The power and possibility of a fully-functional ship with a spore drive.

She realized immediately this was no normal jump. The data was incredible. They were _sustaining_ travel through the mycelial network. That meant two things to Petrellovitz: first, that their target was not anywhere near their starting point, and second, that they were not going to end up where they intended.

Then it was over. Petrellovitz checked the scans just to be sure and found her suspicions entirely confirmed.

They were back in the universe of Discovery's origin.

Petrellovitz scowled at the tiny brig control screen. This was a significant setback. While Lorca could pass as the alternate version of himself and move freely through this universe, she could not.

Unless Lorca was onto something with all that nonsense about fate. The guard walked by to check they had both survived the trip and Petrellovitz glared at him, then resumed pretending to play chess. The guard resumed his post by the door. She opened a comm line.

"Don't look up. I'm in the other cell. We're not supposed to be talking."

The answer was slow to come, hesitant. "Who are you?"

"My name is Petra. I'm a captive of these humans, same as you are, but not the same, because I've taken control of their computer core. Do you understand what that means?"

"Yes."

"I've noticed you speak English well. I had a question for you. Your work creating infiltration agents, Ash Tyler, could you do the same to me? Can you re-skin me?"

Across the brig, L'Rell twisted slightly in her bunk, turning her head to look at the woman in the other cell. Petrellovitz was staring intently at her cell's computer panel, apparently engaged in some sort of human game. L'Rell had seen the game in her own brig controls, but she did not know how to play and no inclination to learn. "You want me to turn you into someone? Who?"

Petrellovitz smiled at her fake display. "Myself."

L'Rell sighed and settled back down. The weapons fire and black alert had roused her from her sleep and now she was being prevented from returning to it. "You do not understand. In order to re-skin you, I need another person to use as a material. Then there are the bones and muscles. They must be resized..." That had taken a very long time to sort out with Voq, especially owing to the difference in cranial size between humans and Klingons.

"I understand perfectly. How long would it take if the template possessed the exact same physical dimensions and characteristics as the person being reskinned? If you only had to change the surface and the surface already matched perfectly in every dimension."

This was a curious question. "A day, with the right tools."

"What about just the tissue on the skull and hands?"

The questions were getting stranger. "A few hours," offered L'Rell.

"Do they have what you need in sickbay?"

L'Rell thought back to her time there, when she had released Ash Tyler from his torment and turned him into whatever he was now. "Yes, they do. But why would I help you?"

"Because we have something in common. The people on this ship are our enemy."

This was not the first time L'Rell had been part of a deal to work alongside a human out of mutual self-interest. She had done the same with Cornwell aboard the Sarcophagus. That arrangement had been sufficient for L'Rell to escape Kol but it had not played out as expected. Instead of being transferred to a secure holding facility, L'Rell had been left to languish in Discovery's brig, a forgotten token of a war that seemed suddenly unimportant to Discovery.

There was no reason to expect this would not turn out similarly, but equally, sitting in this cell was an embarrassing, dishonorable circumstance with no clear end in sight.

L'Rell said slowly, "It would be very painful."

"Sounds fun," said Petrellovitz, keying in new commands through the master override hidden within the Brig Chess program. "Let's take a field trip."

* * *

Materializing with Georgiou in Discovery's transporter room, Burnham looked for some sign of Lorca but all she saw was a pool of blood smeared across the transporter pad. The computer announced a black alert. "Where is he," Burnham demanded of the transporter technician as she stepped down from the transporter.

The curly-haired cadet looked at her haplessly. "Lab 26."

Any further investigation was cut short as Discovery shuddered under an impact. Georgiou stepped down from the transporter pad, hands tight on her phaser rifle, her eyes scanning as if she could spot her prey though Discovery's walls.

"Burnham to Lab 26."

"Unable to comply. Lab 26 is under a command lockdown."

There was a smaller series of shudders—Discovery firing torpedoes—and then the whole ship shook as it initiated a jump to warp ahead of the resulting explosion.

The shaking intensified as the familiar shift of the mycelial drive kicked in. "It's our spore drive," Burnham explained to Georgiou, but this was unlike any previous spore jumps. The shaking did not stop and the vibration of moisture particles in the air continued far longer than was normal. All they could do was hold on and wait.

Discovery dropped back out into normal space. The air around them stilled. Glancing between Burnham and the fearsome Emperor Philippa Georgiou, the transporter technician offered an update: "There was an emergency transport from Lab 26 to the medbay." Emergency medical transports bypassed the transporter pad, but he had seen the transport in his logs.

Burnham turned to Georgiou and held out a hand for her weapon. "You can't keep that on this ship," she advised.

Georgiou handed it over with a sneer. "I don't need it," she proclaimed. "I will make sure he is dead with my own two hands."

For the first time, Burnham felt a slight tinge of concern about the woman she had rescued, but the idea of leaving Georgiou to die on the Charon was too much to bear. The face was cold and hard and angry almost beyond the point of recognition, but when Burnham looked at the emperor, she still saw her old captain and she would not be responsible for Georgiou's death again. This seemed the only way to be rid of the guilt.

Saru's voice came over the comm. "Burnham, what is your status?"

"Cuts and bruises. Nothing serious," said Burnham. "And Lorca?"

There was a pause—a small one, just long enough for Burnham to realize Saru was receiving new information. "Lorca?"

"He came over with O'Malley," said Burnham.

(On the bridge, Saru looked at Owosekun, who shook her head. She had tried to say the name in the moment but had been too shocked herself.)

"He was wounded. He'll be in the medbay," Burnham stated. "The emperor and I are headed there now."

This time, there was no hesitation at the new information. Saru said smoothly, "I will meet you there."

* * *

Lorca was sitting on the ground next to the coffee table, violently throwing the implements of Mischkelovitz's trade at the wall, when the door finally opened. He grabbed the nearest tool, a spanner, and lifted it to throw at Groves' smug face only to freeze in place, not that it mattered. His throw would have been too high. Lorca's face twisted into a question.

"Voice modulator," said Lalana, disturbingly in Groves' voice. She removed the device from the translator around her neck and her usual voice returned. "How are you?"

"Better now that you're here," offered Lorca, liberally smearing on the charm. The confinement had given him time to strategize. "I know a lot's happened, but we can fix this. My people listen to me. They'll back down if I tell 'em. Tell Saru I'm prepared to negotiate, we don't have to be enemies. I want Discovery to get home as much as its crew does. Just not with Michael. I need her. Hell, you can stay too, if you want."

"We are already home," said Lalana, settling down next to his knee.

All the levity fell away. So many times Lalana had said something that seemed to be figurative and it turned out to be literal. There had to be a reason the spore jump had taken far longer than it should have, but Lorca figured it had something to do with compensating for Stamets. Surely she was not saying that... But he knew she was. He stared at her in horror.

Lalana flicked her tail across Lorca's hair at his obvious distress. It only annoyed him further. "I am sorry, I know this is not what you wanted, but it is not as bad as it seems."

Lorca closed his eyes and exhaled. Starfleet was going to lock him up in a hole so dark, it would make this confinement look like an amusement park. When he opened his eyes, it was with an expression of determined annoyance. "How do you figure that?" he seethed. "You gonna help me escape?"

"If need be, but I do not think I will have to. You have committed no crime."

"Really?" said Lorca crossly. "Killin' the other me and taking his place? That's not a crime?"

"I believe they can be convinced to forgive you for taking his place, and they will never know you killed him. Life is a story we tell each other. I told them a story of you. And I am a very good liar, Gabriel."

Except O'Malley had asked the question point-blank on the Charon. The cat was already out of the bag. "I think they're gonna figure it out," said Lorca. Probably as soon as O'Malley woke up. "We need a plan."

"I have a plan. I told them how scared you were to lose Discovery, so now they will understand and help you."

He could scarcely believe his ears. "Why would you say that!" he howled, ignoring the pain.

Lalana's head twisted. "Because it was true. I needed that truth to convince everyone of the lie."

Lorca stared at her. "No wonder Saru fired on the Charon! You _emasculated_ me."

"Gender is not a lului concept," noted Lalana, clicking her tongue lightly.

Lorca grimaced, not meaning it literally, but as usual, literal was what he had gotten. "You know that's not what I meant," he scowled, filled with revulsion and contempt. "You told them I was _weak_."

"That is the difference between our universes, Gabriel. In your universe, a weakness is something to be pounced upon and taken advantage of. Here a weakness can be something else. It can be something for which people have compassion. Now they will help you."

At what cost, he wondered. This was a disaster. He pressed his hands against his head, fingers digging into his scalp.

"The important thing is, they now know what I know. They know you are a good man and that you have a good heart. A heart that includes me."

He remembered the fortune he had cracked open when he first took command of Discovery. Then, as now, he did not believe its contents. "You have got to be kidding me!"

"I promise I am not. For as long as you live, my cells will be in your cardial tissue," Lalana assured him. "I had to put them there to keep you alive."

Petrellovitz, he realized. She was here on Discovery. Petrellovitz had gotten him through the universes the first time and could do so again. He had to find her, get some spores, recreate the experiment, get back, rally his people and convene a meeting with Sarek. Sarek was on his way to the Charon right now, would probably arrive within the hour. Not enough time to set up a return transport, but Lorca would arrive a day or two late, make a dramatic entrance, proclaim some tactical advantage had been gained by this course of action, act as if the whole thing was intentional. In fact, this was an opportunity to negotiate terms with the Federation for every alien not of use to the Empire to be deported to this universe and bring back confirmation of the deal. With a bit of bluster, Georgiou would be cowed back into submission and executed. He had already proven she was weak.

This was salvageable. Lorca could fix it, put the puzzle back together, make it even better this time.

The sound of the door interrupted Lorca's plotting. It was Groves. He dove towards Lorca, grabbed him by the shirt, and shook him as he sprayed spittle and shouted in Lorca's face, " _What the hell did you do to her!_ "

Lorca could feel the rip in his chest begin to tear again. A heady wave of pain swept over him. "Get off me," he said through gritted teeth, half-twisting away.

"Yes," said Lalana, wrapping her tail around Groves' neck. "Put him down, John, or I will deprive your brain of oxygen."

The threat was not idle. Groves could feel the surface of his skin being prodded by a thousand tiny little tendrils. He released Lorca and retreated a few steps. "So help me, I'll kill him myself! You killed her!"

Sneering, Lorca pulled his shirt back into place. "I didn't do anything."

This was enough of a clue for Lalana to realize Mischkelovitz's absence was not because she was watching over an unconscious O'Malley off in the medical bay. "What is he talking about, Gabriel? Where is Emellia?"

Lorca explained, more or less, what Mischkelovitz had said she was doing. Groves watched the message for himself. When it was over, he snatched the holodisc from the air and threw it across the room.

"That is the most asinine thing I've ever heard!" he yelled at the top of his lungs, apoplectic with rage. He sat down on the floor and put his head in his hands. How could Mischkelovitz be so _stupid_.

Because it was a pattern. Mischkelovitz saw patterns in everything. She was easily swept away by them, obsessed with them to a fault. She really, truly thought the universe was configured like a jigsaw puzzle and that everything fit together one way and if she could just figure out all the pieces...

Groves knew the truth. _There was no pattern_. Oh, there were some patterns, like physics and math, but not on the level of significance where Mischkelovitz saw them. Patterns on this level were just the human brain trying to make sense of the random coincidences of the universe.

She had fried her brain for nothing, chasing a remnant that did not exist.

* * *

As the rebel forces neared the Charon's position, an alarm sounded. "We are detecting weapons fire at our target coordinates."

"Do we have a visual?" asked Sarek. He was standing beside the captain's chair on the bridge of the Vulcan-Klingon-Andorian cruiser currently serving as the rebel command ship. Voq was seated in the captain's chair itself.

An image appeared of a small but unmistakable ship silhouetted against the massive glowing orb of the Charon's mycelial reactor: Discovery, barreling down towards the reactor in an apparent suicide run.

"Turn us around," said Sarek.

The helmsman complied, but Voq bristled with dismay. "Is that for you to decide?" Voq asked.

"Perhaps not," said Sarek as the Charon exploded in front of their eyes, "but it seemed only prudent."

The shockwave produced by the ship was massive, on a scale unlike anything. Cheers erupted from the non-Vulcans present. Lorca might have been in control of the Charon, but the ship was a symbol of Terran superiority, and every non-Terran had reason to enjoy seeing it destroyed, even the Vulcans.

Sarek watched the shockwave dispassionately. "It would appear we have gotten more than we bargained for," he intoned. "I suspect this means our deal with Lorca is no more."

"This is a victory!" said Voq.

"It is," agreed Sarek, and signaled the two Vulcan guards standing at the bridge doors with a wave of his hand. At once, their weapons were firing, cutting down every Klingon and Andorian on the bridge.

Voq was splayed out on the ground, gasping as he stared up at Sarek. "You... Why? You have betrayed us."

"No," said Sarek, taking the phaser the guard offered and pointing it down at Voq. "I've done what was necessary for my son." He pulled the trigger and ended Voq's life.

Sarek did not need Lorca or Michael. Waiting in the wings were other, more Vulcan-friendly Terran factions who could see the difference between Vulcans and the other, more grotesque humanoids. As he opened a channel to the rest of the fleet, the pattern of death was repeated across every ship and the Vulcans took control.

"The fall of the Charon," said Sarek, "is the rise of Vulcan."


	97. Facing the Music

A/N: This takes place during episode 14, "The War Without, The War Within." Also, those of you who get e-mail alerts, yes, I did post this with a different title initially. Five minutes later I thought of this shamelessly awful pun and had to change it.

* * *

They were home, but they had not arrived as intended.

Nine months. That was how far they had missed their mark. They had been thrown nine months forward in time and the war they left was not the war they returned to. As the strategic display automatically updated itself with the latest battle and territory information from Federation communication relays, Saru and the bridge crew watched the map turn from blue to red and faced the grim reality of their new circumstance.

They had been gone nine months and the Klingons had won. The Federation lay almost wholly under Klingon control.

Their first order of business was to try and contact whatever remained of Starfleet, but there was no response.

The second was to assess the state of the ship. Riding the mycelial shockwave had left Discovery heavily damaged and on auxiliary power. Saru ordered all available personnel to repair assignments. Under the circumstances, they could not expect any help to come.

That left the matter of unwanted passengers. Lorca was not in sickbay as Saru, Burnham, and Georgiou expected. They found an entirely different set of patients laid out under the bright, silvery-white lights, and one very agitated, hovering lawyer who, when questioned as to the whereabouts of their former captain, said with a shrug:

"Dead."

Georgiou smirked with a mixture of satisfaction and curiosity. "Is he, now."

"Yeah, that's what happens when you're stabbed through the chest," Groves spat. The words verged on comical, but the tone was angry and bitter.

As the medical staff treated Georgiou behind the vague safety of an isolation forcefield, Saru attempted to ascertain what had happened to O'Malley and Mischkelovitz. This time Groves' explanation was less clear.

"I don't know. He—Lorca was dying and Lalana said goodbye and Mac had—was injured, and Melly tried... something, I don't know what, and..."

When it came to lies, Groves really put all of them to shame. He had learned at a very young age how to appear convincingly flummoxed. He was the perfect combination of confusion and nerves, frustration and upset. He sounded completely unrehearsed and in the middle of processing the situation. Burnham and Saru judged him to be a complete wreck. But then, from where they were standing, he was a civilian who never should have been on the ship in the first place. They hardly expected grace under pressure from someone who lacked the experience and training to be on a mission in deep space or a ship in the midst of war. When Groves asked to be leave, claiming he could no longer bear being in the room, Saru granted the request.

Neither of them realized exactly how right Lalana was about the similarities between Groves and Lorca. Like Lorca and Lalana, Groves knew the kernel of a good lie was a central truth, and when he spoke the words in the moment, he truly did not know what had happened to Mischkelovitz, which made it the perfect excuse to go and find out from someone who did.

Dr. Pollard offered her medical assessment of the patients. "The colonel has lost a significant amount of blood, but he'll make a full recovery. Dr. Mischkelovitz..." Pollard took a breath. The exact nature of the issue was confusing. "It appears her implants overloaded, terminating her neural activity."

"Alert me to any changes," instructed Saru. Pollard returned to her patients. Saru addressed Burnham again. "I must inform you as to a change in our status. As of our last jump..."

Most anyone else on the ship would have been elated to learn that Discovery had returned to its home universe, but Burnham, with her Vulcan upbringing, received the information calmly and coolly, glancing at Georgiou as she processed the ramifications.

"Which makes this a very sensitive situation," Saru concluded. "I must ask, what were you thinking?"

Burnham shook her head sadly. "The truth is that I just couldn't watch her die again, Saru. I wanted to offer her more. I am sorry."

"Saving Georgiou may indeed prove to be a grave error in judgment, but, no one else could have done what you did aboard that Terran flagship. You are alive, and we are home."

The medical technician assessing Georgiou completed his examination and the forcefield lowered. "I told you I did not require assistance," was Georgiou's seething indictment as security personnel moved to surround her. She sneered at the display of supposed strength. She could have taken all four of the officers with ease, but not the many dozens that would have followed on a ship that she did not control.

"It is protocol," Saru informed her.

"Where I come from, protocol demands that I eat you," said Georgiou.

Burnham moved between Georgiou and Saru defensively. "This Kelpien is my captain."

"You let livestock command your ships? Yesterday we dined on the entrails of his brethren."

Saru's mouth tightened. Burnham, as always, was treating Saru as if he was incapable of fighting his own battles, and then there was the clear implication that Burnham had _eaten_ at least one member of his species during her time with the Terrans. His voice was firm as he ordered, "Transport our visitor to guest quarters on deck three and confine her there now."

"Is that what I am? Your guest?"

"For now," said Saru as the white light of the transport enveloped the former emperor. He turned to Burnham.

"I'm sorry. I hoped to spare you the pain," Burnham offered.

Saru grimaced. Perhaps she had, but it still hurt to know that out of everyone Saru had ever met, the person who respected him the least was the one he had known the longest. He pushed the matter aside for the moment and addressed the room. "The presence of a Terran defector on this ship is to be regarded as classified. Its utterance will carry a penalty of treason. Is that understood?"

The chorus of ayes in the room reflected the truth. Burnham might not have moved past her perceptions of Saru from their history together, but everyone else had.

* * *

Saru returned to the bridge just as scanners picked up an approaching vessel with a Federation signature. "Hail them at once," said Saru, taking over the captain's chair from Airiam.

The hail was not returned. "Captain," said Owosekun, "its shields are up. Its phasers are charged and targeting."

"Shields up!" said Saru, but it was too late.

"I'm picking up incoming transporter signatures," said Rhys. "We're being boarded."

Armed figures appeared in cascades of light around the bridge. Saru's command was simultaneous to the eruption of chaos and confusion as the intruders took up positions targeting each station and hapless crewmembers withdrew their hands from their controls. "Identify yourselves!"

The boarding party was being led by a familiar face, Captain Sherak. "Hands where we can see them!" he ordered.

"I demand an explanation for this intrusion," said Saru.

"We ask the questions," Sherak warned. "Clear for transport."

Two final figures appeared on the bridge. Ambassador Sarek and Admiral Cornwell.

"Where's Captain Lorca?" Cornwell demanded. When the answer did not come quickly enough, she followed with, "Computer, initiate command level override. Authorization, Admiral Katrina Cornwell, Pi-Beta-6. Start with him."

Sarek strode towards Saru. "Ambassador, what are you doing!"

"What the times require," said Sarek, pressing his hands to Saru's face. "My mind to your mind. My thoughts to your thoughts."

Saru's jaw clicked in distress as Sarek overrode his psyche, peeling away the layers like petals on a flower and digging deep into the events of the past few days because for Discovery, that was all it had been.

"Mr. Saru is who he appears to be," Sarek concluded, but the calm Vulcan exterior broke a moment. "The Discovery has been through an inconceivable ordeal."

"Then where the hell is her commanding officer?"

Sarek turned back to Cornwell, emotionless façade restored. "Captain Lorca is dead."

* * *

Cornwell convened a meeting in the conference room with Saru, Sarek, Burnham, and Stamets. Hearing the full details of Lorca's subterfuge, Cornwell could scarcely contain her shock and anger. To think the man she had been championing, consoling, and had _slept with_ all those months ago had been an impostor the whole time. She took her phaser, adjusted it to full, and fired on a bowl of fortune cookies sitting on the table. Her outburst concluded, they proceeded with other subjects.

The situation was as bad as it seemed. There was one spark of hope in all the calamity: Discovery had not returned from the other universe empty-handed, it had brought with it the cloak-breaking algorithm. Cornwell had immediately disseminated the algorithm to Starfleet's remaining ships, but as she explained the tactical situation to Saru, Burnham, and Stamets, she expressed the very real possibility that the cloaking algorithm had arrived far too late to make a difference.

As she listed out atrocities committed by the Klingons during their advance, the situation began to seem worse and worse. One-third of the fleet had been eradicated. Outposts, starbases, and whole colonies had been wiped from the map. Kol's death had fractured the Klingon leadership and now all twenty-four houses were acting as independent marauders, greedily engulfing Federation territory as they competed for renown and glory, making impossible any negotiation.

Cornwell's directive was clear. "Discovery will jump to Starbase 1 immediately. All evidence of your recent journey will be classified and destroyed. We cannot risk the knowledge of this alternate universe leaving the confines of Discovery."

Stamets shook his head. "We used up the last of our supply of spores to get us home and I can't jump without them."

They would have to make the journey at warp, across sectors full of Klingons.

"We will also have to dispose of Lorca's remains," said Saru.

A ripple of shock passed across Cornwell's face. "He's... he's here on Discovery?"

"His body was recovered," confirmed Saru.

"I would like to see it for myself," announced Burnham. It seemed an odd request, but Georgiou had put a kernel of doubt in the back of Burnham's mind back in sickbay. Such doubts were not easily shaken.

"Admiral?"

"Make sure it's incinerated," was all Cornwell said. Perhaps the better thing would have been to see the body herself, obtain some closure, but it felt like the only closure she needed was knowing every last trace of that impostor was gone from their universe.

When Burnham and Saru stepped into the turbolift, Stamets stepped in with them. "Deck nine," said Saru, and Stamets did not call out otherwise. It turned out they were all headed for the same destination.

"You have some business in Lab 26, lieutenant?" asked Saru.

"Just a quick word with Lalana," said Stamets.

"Who is Lalana?"

Saru and Stamets realized Burnham had never encountered the lului. "That's..." Stamets was unsure how to answer the question. A friend of Lorca's? A secret crewmember? A hitchhiker?

"She is a member of a classified research team," said Saru. "She was... acquainted with the captain."

"Are you familiar with 'Lorca's alien?'" offered Stamets, because that was what Lorca had called her when they first met and he had forgotten the actual species name. The designation did not ring any bells for Burnham.

"She is a lului," clarified Saru.

"Ah," said Burnham, "the technophobic species discovered in 2246 and designated as a Federation protectorate." She knew several other facts from the anthropological report but kept them to herself.

The Lab 26 doors did not answer to Saru's command. They had to wait for Groves to let them in, which took so long that two security personnel arrived with a gurney to move the body while they waited and Saru began to feel agitated, sensing something was up.

When the doors finally opened, Groves mumbled a vague apology about the delay, citing "O'Malley's security procedures."

The lab felt empty without Mischkelovitz. Evidence of her was everywhere—in the piles of abandoned junk and half-finished engineering projects scattered throughout the room—but there was an unsettling quietude to the place.

"He's in there," Groves told them when asked, waving his hand in the direction of Lalana's door. "But I wouldn't go in if I were you."

"We have seen dead bodies before, specialist," Saru said reassuringly. Groves only shrugged, thinking that it was their funeral.

They had seen dead bodies, but they were unprepared for what awaited them. The body lay on a couch soaked through by an enormous black stain of dried blood extending all the way to the carpet. Burnham, Saru, and Stamets recognized the dark uniform and silver-black armor worn by Lorca aboard the Charon and the familiar crop of short, brown-black hair on his head, but little else. There was a void of raw flesh and exposed bone where his face should have been. Lalana was crouched on the back of the couch above him, her tail draped down across his collar.

If they had looked closely enough, they would have noticed a distinctive, lacelike pattern of brown across the body's hands and the fact the hands were too big for the man they thought they were looking at, but no one wanted to look that closely.

"What did you do?" asked Burnham, the only one with enough presence of mind to ask the question.

"His face was my most favorite part of him, so I made it a part of me," said Lalana.

Stamets covered his mouth, feeling bile rise in the back of his throat. Beside him, Saru straightened, shocked by the idea of it. He had seen images of his own kind flayed for food, so the sight of this mutilated corpse was not wholly unfamiliar, but it felt too close to that not-so-distant reality.

Lalana could see their revulsion and confusion. She happily explained, "I know cannibalism is not favored among your species, but it is among mine. The original Captain Lorca's body was incinerated, so there was nothing for me to eat. I am very glad to have gotten the chance to amend that."

"I warned you," Groves called out from the main lab area. There was a reason he had chosen not to reenter the room.

The security officers went to work, sealing the body in a bag and lifting it onto the gurney to move to the corridor outside where it could be beamed away. Burnham left with them, having confirmed what she came for, but Saru remained in the main lab to order Groves to disable the lab's independent security protocols. Groves uncharacteristically mumbled an explanation about having coopted O'Malley's security protocols in the event of an incursion while they were under Terran threat and being unable to reset them.

The whole time, Stamets stood there wondering if he had made a mistake, but he was there because he wanted to say something important, difficult as it was after what he had just witnessed. It felt important because he was not sure anyone would say it to Lalana and in the wake of his own loss, someone ought to. "I'm sorry. I know he meant something to you."

"Thank you, Paul. You meant something to him, too. You were... he... he very much enjoyed..."

Something happened in Lalana's eyes. Her pupils quivered, dilating and constricting, as if rapidly shifting focus. She seemed to wobble on her perch. Then she pitched forward on the couch, half-rolling, half-bouncing off the cushions and slamming against the edge of the coffee table as she landed between the table and couch. Mischkelovitz's leftover tools clattered loudly against the glass surface of the table.

Stamets rushed forward, yelling for Saru, but stopped short of actually touching Lalana. Black ichor bubbled up from various spots along her body. Her tongue shifted, barely managing to produce syllables, but the translator eked out, "Too much... poison..."

Saru attempted to contact sickbay. "Unable to comply," intoned the computer.

"Probably something she ate," Groves quipped. "Don't worry, I know what to do. I'll take care of it."

"She has been poisoned," said Saru. "We must begin biological containment procedures until we have identified the contaminant. Contact the medical bay immediately, Specialist Groves."

"I'll take her there myself! Here, just let me—" Stamets blocked Groves. The black ichor, for all they knew, was toxic to the touch.

"Specialist! That was an order," Saru said in a tone that invited no further objections.

Groves stood there, staring blankly at Saru and failing to comply. The minute someone walked in with a medical tricorder, the jig was going to be up. Any scan of the room would make obvious the subterfuge. "Trust me, you don't want me to do that. Everything in existence is at stake—"

"You will comply _immediately_ or—"

There was a bang from the wall to the left of the couch. A muffled voice came from within. "Give it up, Groves! Let me out!"

Even muffled it was clear who the voice belonged to. That voice had been barking orders at them all for months now. Stamets noticed a panel fastening tool incongruously sitting on the floor at the base of the wall and grabbed it, prying open the panel. Lorca pushed from the inside and the panel went careening away to the side, falling flat against the ground and reverberating like a gong.

"What is going on here!" exclaimed Saru.

"What the hell does it look like, Saru," said Lorca acidly as he stepped down from the alcove in the wall, rubbing his shoulder at the lingering ache of being shoved into an access space not designed for a human.

"I do not think you want me to answer that," Saru replied sharply, "as it appears we have yet again fallen prey to another of your manipulations."

"You think _I_ did this?" asked Lorca with exaggerated incredulity. "I'm the victim here!"

"If anyone's the victim, it's your little alien friend!" exclaimed Stamets.

"She'll be fine," Lorca replied. "Poison's out. She just needs to rest."

Groves was genuinely panicked. "Everyone, stop! Shut up and listen to me!"

The one thing Groves' explanation made clear was that he believed the idea of a manifest paradox with such fervency he was willing to do almost anything to make sure no one knew Lorca was alive. Saru and Stamets listened carefully and concluded that, as uncertain as this was, there was a nonzero chance Groves was right. There was no telling what would happen if some action taken in the future destabilized the probability of an event in the past. So far, they would seem to have disrupted nothing, and the safest course of action was to make sure this remained true.

The only person who seemed not to believe Groves was Lorca. He still found the paradox theory more frustrating than believable and its only virtue from his perspective was that it provided an incentive to give him what he wanted. "Look, you're back on your feet," he said to Stamets casually, "just jump me home. No one will ever know I was alive if I'm not here. And I'll shut down the reactor on the Charon, I promise. There's no Stamets over there to turn it back on, so reality'll be safe."

It sounded like Lorca was spinning a fairytale and clearly he was missing some key facts, but Stamets' first instinct was to clear up the last part of Lorca's statement. "What happened to the other me? Did—did you kill him?" (He knew, from his dreamlike encounter with the other Stamets in the mycelial network during his period of unconsciousness, that his counterpart had no love for Lorca.)

"You wouldn't have liked him, anyway," shrugged Lorca.

"I met him. I didn't like him. The point still stands!"

"It does not matter," said Saru, "as we have no spores left and the reactor has already been destroyed."

"I couldn't jump you anywhere even if I wanted to," said Stamets curtly, making it very clear he had zero intention of doing any more jumps for Lorca.

Shocked, Lorca sat down on the couch, dried blood crunching beneath him. The bulk of his most loyal supporters and his most powerful asset had just been stripped away. His position was untenable.

A fury rose in Lorca so black it could have collapsed the room into a hole. He slammed both his fists down so hard on the coffee table everything on its surface bounced several inches into the air and objects went flying off onto the floor like engineering confetti, but the synthetic glass was too strong to break under the impact and the force traveled back up his arms. He grabbed his chest in pain. A gasp escaped, soundless but for the croak of air in his throat, and he doubled over. A moment later, he upended the table with a kick that sent it tumbling halfway to the door. Then he sat in quiet agony with his head by his knees, air hissing through his teeth.

"Where is the recording from the alternate future?" asked Saru. His ganglia itched along the back of his skull.

They searched the room, a task made harder by the scattered mess Lorca had created. The holodisc had disappeared. Suspicion immediately fell on Lorca, but when he turned out his pockets in furious annoyance, the only thing he had on him was Allan's tooth. (Saru wondered why Lorca had a human tooth in his pocket but decided it was better not to ask.)

"It's possible," said Groves, "that the disc vanished because we're experiencing temporal instability."

"More likely it rolled off into a corner when you threw it," Lorca sniped at Groves. He nudged Lalana's shoulder with his foot, reaching a hand down towards her.

"I wouldn't do that, she's covered in poison," Stamets advised.

Lorca's shirt was in a sorry state after everything he had been through, slashed and cut and soaked through with dried blood. "I would." He pulled it off and wrapped Lalana in it, grimacing and grunting as he lifted her up and carried her to the back wall. His chest screamed at him. It was a welcome sensation, a physical pain to match the acute disappointment he was feeling.

On a hunch, Lorca went for the biggest storage compartment and was rewarded by the sight of a sealed vat of biomimetic gel sliding out. He carefully lowered Lalana inside and stood there, frowning and shirtless, leaning with his hands on the edge of the drawer. Lalana's eyes stared blankly up at him, the pupils fully constricted.

"This is completely unacceptable," Saru admonished Groves. "We must inform the admiral. Release the control override on the lab."

"You're gonna sell me out to that Vulcan taskmaster?" asked Lorca, wiping the gel from his forearms. "After everything I've done for you?"

"I do not know where Admiral Terral is. Admiral Cornwell is aboard Discovery."

Lorca shook his head and sneered with disdain. Unbelievable. He described Cornwell in a set of entirely unflattering and unrepeatable terms, adding, "I spent two days in Klingon prison and she thinks _I_ should be stripped of command? They've had her for weeks! The gall of it."

"It has been nine months since Admiral Cornwell was captured," corrected Saru.

Groves saw an opportunity to hit Lorca in the side of the head with a proverbial curveball and jumped on it gleefully. "Oh, yeah, I forgot to tell you. We're nine months in the future from when we left. We didn't just slip through two universes, we basically slipped on a banana peel through time."

Something happened none of them had ever seen before.

Lorca's face went blank.

* * *

Cornwell's arrival provided Petrellovitz a unique opportunity and created a pressing need for her to execute her plan swiftly lest the assembled pieces become scattered.

"I'll bring you out soon," were the last words she said to L'Rell as she tucked a pile of blankets into her bunk and beamed out of the brig while the guard was distracted by a strange whistling sound coming from behind a wall panel. A minor tweak to the pressure of a plasma conduit. Discovery's crew was largely young and inexperienced and easy to trick. After a few minutes of frustration, the guard called for a repair tech to come address the issue and resumed his watch of the brig cells, confident he was looking at one sleeping human and one scarily alert Klingon, none the wiser as to the deception.

Next came the call: the Klingon prisoner was being transported to the USS Khorana. Brig to brig transport, nothing to be concerned about. The guard accepted the command completely, accompanied as it was by the proper security codes authorizing the transfer.

L'Rell found herself in a cargo bay surrounded by crates of supplies. Petrellovitz was putting on a set of fabricated surgical clothing, momentarily naked and entirely concerned about it. "If you're thinking about overpowering me, know that the computer will automatically alert them to your presence if I don't supply it with the correct codeword every ten minutes. You might get to the shuttlebay, but I wouldn't count on getting much farther." She finished off her look with a surgical mask and a short blonde wig. Then she briefly conversed with the medical bay, alerting them that a specialist was coming over from the Khorana to take a look at Mischkelovitz, and beamed away.

L'Rell stood in the cargo bay and waited. Two minutes later, the light of the transporter enveloped her again.

This time, she materialized in one of the private offices off the main area of the medical bay. The lights were low, the window was set to opaque for privacy, and it was presently configured as a surgical suite.

The woman on the slab was identical to Petrellovitz in almost every regard except one. Where Petrellovitz was marked by countless scars on her face and body, the woman on the slab was entirely unblemished. Other than that, they could have been the same person, so close was the resemblance. L'Rell gazed in amazement. Now she understood Petrellovitz's previous questions. "This is... How?"

"We're clones," said Petrellovitz flatly. "I hope this is everything you need."

A wide array of surgical tools lay at L'Rell's disposal. "Yes, this will do. Computer, lights to full." Petrellovitz winced at the change.

"What is wrong with you?" asked L'Rell, noticing the reaction to the lights. She had seen that reaction before with Lorca when she was torturing him.

"Minor radiation incident," muttered Petrellovitz. "Give me her eyes if you can."

"Could you not simply fix your scars?"

The difference in quantum signatures between the two universes was not limited to inanimate objects. In time, Petrellovitz's own skin would be replaced by skin that matched this universe as her cells were naturally replaced by new ones created after ingesting this universe's food and drink, but until then, she was taking no chances. "I prefer this. It's symbolic."

L'Rell began. Every ten minutes, as promised, the computer prompted Petrellovitz for a word. "Fox" was the first one. The implants on either side of the skull provided some trouble—they seemed to be integrated into the surrounding tissue to an alarming extent—but L'Rell managed to cut around them and excised the face into a fleshy sleeve ready for transplant. The next step was to remove Petrellovitz's skin.

"Albatross," said Petrellovitz.

"Give me the words in case you lose consciousness," said L'Rell.

"I won't," promised Petrellovitz. "Do your worst."

L'Rell removed Petrellovitz's skin in record time. There was no need to do a clean job; the skin was not going to be retained. Remarkably, Petrellovitz stayed awake as L'Rell worked from back to front, administering her own local anesthetic. The sounds she occasionally made did not seem to be of pain. "Most humans would not be able to take this," noted L'Rell, reminded again of Lorca.

"There's no one else like me." It seemed an odd statement from an admitted clone. Petrellovitz stopped L'Rell only when the Klingon was about to remove the first eye. "I'm trusting you."

"And I am trusting you," replied L'Rell.

"The next word is zebra, followed by turtle and canary."

"Zebra, turtle, canary," repeated L'Rell, and repeated the words again when the computer prompted. Petrellovitz did not completely lose consciousness, but she did begin to drift in and out.

L'Rell finished the first eye. "Marvelous," said Petrellovitz, testing the function. It was a little blurry, but the bright lights in the room were no longer an issue. L'Rell moved on to the next and marveled at how easy this was when the source and target were so similar. There weren't even any tissue compatibility issues to worry about; Petrellovitz's biology accepted the transplanted material as if it were her own native biology.

Horse and rattlesnake came and went. L'Rell finished the skull work and began on the first hand, emboldened by their quick progress to take almost the whole forearm up to the elbow. She was sliding it into place when the alarm sounded.

"Forget the left hand," said Petrellovitz, keying commands into the terminal beside her. "Close up. I can buy us a few minutes."

Petrellovitz dispensed something in a hypospray. L'Rell asked what it was. "Vetroxican. Should knock me out for an hour or two. Take her." Petrellovitz shoved her double's body off the slab into L'Rell's waiting arms and took Mischkelovitz's place. "Stick to the story. We sink or swim on how well you play this."

* * *

Cornwell ordered every record of Discovery's jaunt into the mirror universe destroyed. The risk of proof escaping the ship and disrupting everything in their universe was too great.

To her surprise, someone had beaten her to the punch. All the security footage was already gone.

"That's convenient," said Cornwell darkly.

"I'm sorry, admiral," said Rhys, roughly the third time in as many minutes he had spoken those words. He was updating her as to the situation in the captain's ready room. Cornwell had set the lights higher so the room felt less like Lorca. "The system registered a power overload when we jumped. It wiped everything, main and backups."

Cornwell chewed her lip. "You're telling me this was an accidental power overload? That only wiped your security footage?"

Rhys visibly paled. "I'm sorry, admiral. That's what it looks like."

That made no sense. It reeked of sabotage. But who would want the footage wiped? And why? "What about the prisoners in the brig?" Georgiou was not the only refugee that would need to be dealt with, though she was the one less inclined to try and take over the ship.

"We just have the one, ah, Emellia Petrellovitz—"

"Hang on. What about L'Rell?"

"The Klingon? She was transferred to the Khorana."

"On whose authority!"

Somehow Rhys got paler. The authorization codes were right there on the padd in his hand. "Yours?"

"Give me that," said Cornwell, snatching the padd and glancing down at it. There it was, plain as day. The same authorization codes she had used to take command of Discovery were staring her in the face. "I didn't order that. Contact the Khorana." This took some doing—Sherak was running his ship as stealthily as possible—but they eventually made contact and Cornwell took the reply hail from the captain's chair on the bridge.

The Khorana did not have the Klingon. "There are no records of any transport," said Sherak. "We have no prisoners in our brig and all life signs are accounted for. I will check again if you require, admiral." If Sherak sounded curt, it was largely because all tempers were frayed at this point, Cornwell's included. No one in Starfleet much cared for niceties these days.

"No, Cornwell out. Lieutenant, scan and account for all life signs on this ship."

Owosekun hastened to comply and immediately identified the problem. "Admiral, the internal scanners have been compromised."

"What?"

"Attempting to bypass." The full technical explanation was too much to relay to Cornwell in the moment, but Owosekun could clearly see someone had told the computer to pull its internal scanner data not from the scanners themselves but from a set of dummy data. "It's the Mudd protocols. After Mudd took over the ship, we developed a backdoor in the event someone boarded."

There was more to the protocol than a simple command backdoor. It also let the intruder think they had control of the ship so that the officer who was actually in control could retake the ship at a moment's notice once the time was right, and allowed all authorized personnel to maintain covert communications access. All in all, Lorca had been very pleased with the idea, especially since at the time it had been keyed to revert all control to him should someone like Mudd or Cornwell come aboard.

In other words, the protocol contravened the very thing Cornwell's command codes were supposed to let her do: walk onto a starship and seize control from its captain.

"Who is in command of this ship!"

Owosekun traced the protocol. The answer to that question should have been Saru, but someone had coopted the protocol. "It's... the Brig Chess program! I'm locked out of it."

At her station, Airiam immediately launched into an investigation of her own. Owosekun was locked out, but Airiam had her personal alert node, provided to her by Groves. "I can access the program," she reported. "One moment." She sat at her engineering console, stiff and upright, appearing to do nothing. In her head, she was parsing the recent player access logs.

There was Groves, his last access right at the moment of their jump back home, but since then, he had been inactive and the only active player was... "Pet 'R,'" reported Airiam, turning to face the captain's chair. "The Terran, Petra."

"She's in the brig," Rhys said, bringing up the security feed to the main viewscreen, but immediately realized the error of his statement. From the camera angle offered by the security feed in the cell, it was clear they were looking at a pile of blankets. (There was only supposed to be a single blanket in the cell, but Petrellovitz had deemed it insufficient to craft her hoax and told the computer to provide her a couple extra.)

"Red alert," said Cornwell.

"Wait!" said Owosekun, but too late. Rhys had already triggered the alarm. For a moment, Owosekun wished Lorca were in command. Cornwell had just tipped Petrellovitz off and Lorca would have seen that from a mile away. Lorca always made it a point to mislead his enemies. His allies, too, when it came down to it. "She's in the system again."

The bridge crew sprang to life around Cornwell like a well-oiled machine. The admiral was entirely redundant in the face of their collective competency.

"Attempting to locate her access point," Owosekun declared.

"Revoking Brig Chess command access," said Airiam, mentally throwing a message to Groves as she did.

"Checking transporter logs," Bryce reported from his station.

"Dispatching security teams to shuttlebay and transporter rooms," said Rhys. "Turbolifts are locked." He reorganized the orders to have any available personnel at critical positions arm themselves in place.

"Find her!" demanded Cornwell. If anyone heard her desperate attempt at relevance, they made no sign of it.

* * *

Saru was already en route to the bridge when the red alert sounded. "Bridge," he said as he stepped into the turbolift. The doors closed and the turbolift began to move.

Then it stopped.

After spending the better part of an hour in a room whose security protocols had been coopted by a civilian and having reached a decision that same civilian did not agree with, Saru had a guess as to what was going on. "Saru to Groves! This is a red alert! Release the turbolift immediately!"

"It's not me!"

Saru could hear the panic in Groves' voice. "Saru to bridge! Status report."

Bryce was not panicked. "Sir, the Terran prisoner escaped the brig and took control of the Mudd protocols."

"Keep me updated," was Saru's order. He knew the two best people to handle that problem on the ship were Owosekun and Airiam, both of whom were currently on the bridge.

After a few minutes, Bryce reported the protocols were disabled and the turbolift resumed. Saru found the bridge fully engaged in the task at hand. He stepped into position at the science console.

"I've located them. They're in Cargo Bay 3," said Owosekun.

"Dispatching," confirmed Rhys, bringing up the security feeds. Most of the views were obstructed by rows of cargo crates stacked to the ceiling, but in one angle, L'Rell was visible pummeling a body clad in a brig-issue jumpsuit. Her fists had reduced the head to a pulp.

The security team beamed in at a safe distance from L'Rell, shouting and raising their weapons towards her. Saru watched the Klingon's shoulders rise and fall with deep breaths of exertion as she released the body and turned to face the officers, raising her hands in surrender.

"Take her to the brig," ordered Cornwell, rising from the captain's chair.

"Admiral, there is something I must speak to you about. In private," Saru said.

"I look forward to hearing it," said Cornwell joylessly. "Commander, with me."

In the turbolift, Cornwell requested Saru speak his mind.

"It is of a classified nature," said Saru. The turbolift was hardly a secure space to speak. The same went for the brig, where L'Rell offered an explanation as to what had happened.

"She took me," said L'Rell, "said she wanted to broadcast to my people and turn over Discovery. She did not understand that I left, or that there are many Klingon houses. She made me tell her about them. I did. Then you became aware of her. She was distracted dealing with your people. I stopped her."

A crucial detail Saru had missed during his turbolift confinement was that the Mudd protocols had been overridden not thanks to the combined skills of Owosekun, Airiam, and Groves, but because their opponent had suddenly stopped fighting.

"Brig Chess," said Cornwell when they were back in the hall.

"It was a program that was added during the null time incident when Mr. Groves was confined to the brig," said Saru. It seemed unwise to mention the program's enduring popularity in light of the problems it had caused.

"Who added it?"

"Dr. Mischkelovitz."

"I want to talk to her."

"Dr. Pollard does not think it likely she will recover from her neural injury."

Cornwell grimaced, pressing her thumb to her mouth in agitated thought. "I want a full review of that program."

"I recommend Commander Airiam lead the investigation. There is also the other issue I must speak with you about," Saru reminded her.

They headed back to the bridge, intending to use the ready room, but when Airiam was informed of her new task, she asked, "Should I have Mr. Groves assist?"

"Groves?" echoed Saru, feeling a gnawing alarm in his stomach.

"He wrote the program."

"You said it was Mischkelovitz," said Cornwell.

Saru assumed it was Mischkelovitz because Groves had been in the brig. Groves could not have...

But he had. The Lab 26 protocols, which he claimed were O'Malley's. Saru realized the reason his mind had jumped to Groves when the turbolift stopped working was that, subconsciously, he had already figured it out.

"Admiral, I did not think it possible, but I believe Mr. Groves programmed the game from the confines of the brig. I must speak with you immediately. It cannot wait any longer."

* * *

Groves let them into the lab because resistance would have been futile in the long run. "You have to keep this secret or the whole universe is gonna go poof," was his greeting to Cornwell.

"Be that as it may, Mr. Groves," said Saru, "it has come to our attention that you have compromised several of the ship's systems and I'm afraid I must take you into custody."

"Know a good lawyer?" said Groves, smiling with amusement at his own terrible joke.

Cornwell did not hang around to hear Groves plead his case with Saru. She was no longer interested in Groves or his chess program. She attempted to open the door to Lalana's room, the controls buzzing negatively in response, and Groves opened the door for her from across the lab.

For a long moment after she entered and the door slid shut behind her, there were no words. Cornwell stared at Lorca, his bare chest displaying the confused mess of tissue left by Mischkelovitz, and he stared at her from his position on the couch, trying to find something in her face besides bitter anger. "Kat," he finally said.

"You," she seethed, "do _not_ get to call me that. You do not get to speak. You... _monster_."

Lorca's face settled into a dry glower. Not everyone hated monsters as much as Cornwell apparently did. "Guess the cat's out of the bag." It was as much an admission that he was a monster as a clever little workaround to show that, even if he wasn't using her nickname, he could still use it. He could still play tricks on her and get the better of her.

Cornwell drew her phaser and pointed it at Lorca, exactly as she had done with the bowl of fortune cookies. Her finger hovered on the trigger.

"You gonna kill me?" he asked. "That's very Starfleet of you."

"You don't know anything about Starfleet," she said.

"Don't I? I know that you're the self-proclaimed good guys, protecting innocent aliens. Like I did at Pahvo. But you were still gonna take my ship away, weren't you?"

She could scarcely believe her ears. Her mouth fell open. The shock lasted only a moment. " _This isn't your ship!_ " Her phaser pointed away from him, at least, because she was so angry she realized she was at risk of shooting him unintentionally.

"I built this ship!" Lorca shouted back. "I gave you the idea! Win the war with science and cookies, the 'Starfleet' way. You crewed me up with a bunch of damn cadets and I turned them into a fighting force capable of winning this war. All you had to do was let me keep Discovery! But you couldn't do that, could you? Because—"

"Because you aren't him! You lied to me!"

Lorca's face twisted into mocking indignation. "You think he never lied to you?"

Cornwell gasped involuntarily. They had that in common, the two of them. They were always playing with their cards against their chest, never sharing, misdirecting to get what they wanted, using her affection as a way to get what they wanted. They were both of them manipulative bastards and they always had been.

"Don't you dare," she said, wagging her finger, but she put her phaser back in its holster. "You don't know anything about my Gabriel."

The truth was Lorca knew more about her Lorca than she did not just because Lalana had told him the man's entire life story, but because he knew for a fact he thought like the other Lorca did. He had realized as much reading the other Lorca's logs. They were more alike than probably anyone wanted to admit. (Except Lalana, who was clinging to this fact like it was a tree in San Francisco.)

Lorca could have pressed the point with Cornwell, really beaten her up with it, but there seemed to be nothing more to gain from the venture. Instead, he said, "I know that he wouldn't be capable of winning this war, but I am."

There was a point in there. Perhaps a Terran could win this war, but Cornwell was dead-set on making sure it would not be Lorca. "You're too late. We've been overrun. The Klingons are everywhere."

This was Lorca's first update as to the tactical situation and it did not mesh with what he expected to hear. "How—I destroyed the Sarcophagus for you!"

"And now, instead of one enemy to negotiate with, we have twenty-four."

Lorca immediately realized that, while the destruction of the Sarcophagus should have given Starfleet the opportunity to retaliate in full force against a disorganized enemy, rather than go on the offensive, the Federation had probably turned the momentary strategic advantage into an attempt to negotiate. (They had. Any advantage Kol's death offered was lost when the Federation reached out, suggested this was an opportunity for peaceful resolution while the Klingons recovered from the loss of their leader, and twenty-four Klingon houses had laughed at the implication Kol's death meant anything to them and gone on to prove exactly how wrong the Federation was.)

"You—nimrods! You had everything you needed to win! I handed you victory on a platter!"

"You took our _cloaking algorithm_ to another universe! _Nine months!_ "

In nine months, they had not been able to craft another, not without the spore drive to gather all the data before the Klingons could disable any sensors planted on their ships. They had tried it and failed. Lorca's anger fell away, replaced by a very real regret. It was a look of regret she recognized from their ill-fated night together. "I didn't mean to," he said.

"That doesn't change the fact you did," she said, icily now that she realized this had not been his ultimate intention.

"I thought Discovery'd be gone a few weeks," he said. "Just long enough..." He looked away.

"Just long enough for us to think we needed you?" she asked. He swallowed and grimaced; that was a yes. "We did need you. As much as it pains me to admit it."

"I'm here now," he said.

Her head shook faintly. "I don't know you are. Who are you?" She had been asking that question ever since the moment she learned the truth.

"I'm Gabriel Lorca." And as if he needed to convince himself of it as much as her: "I'm still Gabriel Lorca."


	98. A Fate Worse Than Death

A/N: Should... should I have titled the previous chapter "Defacing the Music" or would that have been too much? Ahaha... ha...

Three chapters left after this one.

* * *

They could not put Lorca in the brig for obvious reasons. They could not, for even more obvious reasons, put Groves there, either. "If we disabled all computer access in the lab, we can keep them there," concluded Saru.

Kumar took one look at the things Mischkelovitz had done in the walls and vetoed this idea. "I don't even know what half these mods are, but that's clearly mushroom stuff," he said when he pulled open the access panel nearest the door and saw the mess of mycelial tubing. "We need a full engineering team of experts, ideally the people who built this ship."

"Can you disable access in crew quarters?" asked Cornwell, remembering a complaint from Dr. Samaritan Li that had come across her desk many years back.

"Sure," said Kumar.

"Completely disabled. Not even emergency safeties."

"You got it, admiral."

The suggestion gave Saru pause. It seemed unethical. "Lorca has been recently injured," Saru said after Kumar was gone. "If there are complications..."

Lorca was not the only one who could communicate an entire symphony of disdain with a single glance. The look Cornwell gave Saru said in no uncertain terms that Lorca's survival was not only so far down the list of priorities it came somewhere after organizing a crew movie night, it was also just as optional.

Twenty minutes later, Kumar was done. "I even disconnected the toilet and shower controls just in case. They can only be triggered from the outside now." So far as he knew, these modifications were being made purely for the benefit of Groves and this was his little way of getting back at Groves for everything in null time. Had he known the same fate awaited Lorca, he would have been even more pleased.

"Perfect," said Cornwell. "Bring them out."

Lorca and Groves both objected to the move. "I'd rather be in the brig," said Lorca.

"Good for you," said Cornwell blandly.

"I'd rather he was in the brig, too," said Groves.

Cornwell did not dignify that with a response. "Transporter room—"

"Wait!" Groves shouted, throwing up his hands in desperation. "What are we supposed to do in there with no computer? Can I—can I at least get a violin? Saru!"

Saru looked at Groves with pity. "I will arrange one for you."

"Fan—"

"Energize," said Cornwell. Groves and Lorca vanished in a shimmer of light. Their disappearance did nothing to lighten her mood. "See to it that this place is taken care of and let me know the minute Lalana is awake."

"Yes, admiral."

Cadet Tilly was more than happy to make her own assessment of Mischkelovitz's modifications; she understood what they were better than anyone else. She also remembered how stridently Mischkelovitz had cautioned against anyone finding out the true nature of the system, so she kept her conversation informal as she poked around the walls. "Is it true she's not going to wake up?"

That was the greatest tragedy where Saru was concerned. If only he had convinced Lorca to send Mischkelovitz away all those months ago, the quirky scientist would still be with them today. "Unfortunately, it seems unlikely."

"Poor Mac—I mean, Colonel O'Malley. He lost his brother and now his sister, too."

Tilly was preoccupied enough with her assigned task that she did not see the dawning realization in Saru's posture. Saru himself did not have time to finish fully processing the implications.

"Pollard to Commander Saru. Sir, Dr. Mischkelovitz is awake!"

* * *

It was a miracle Pollard could not explain. "There was zero brain activity on my scans. A doctor from the Khorana came over and applied some sort of experimental protocol and now..." Pollard had gone to check on Mischkelovitz in the temporary surgical suite and saw the activity change on the monitor. According to the notations left by the other doctor on the chart, the patient was expected to make a full recovery as a result of this mysterious "protocol."

Mischkelovitz looked at Pollard and Saru, strangely sedate. "Can I go now?"

"I don't think that's wise," said Pollard. "I don't know if the protocol has any side effects, or even how it works. I'd like to monitor Dr. Mischkelovitz until further notice."

Mischkelovitz slid off the medical slab, opened one of the drawers set into the base, and pulled out a remote monitor. She slapped it onto her neck. "You're monitoring me. Now can I go?"

"Where is it you wish to go?" asked Saru.

"My quarters," was the answer. "I'm tired."

Pollard shook her head at Saru. Culber might have developed a rapport with Mischkelovitz but no one else on staff had and Mischkelovitz was a notoriously difficult patient. Pollard was more than happy to shift both the blame and responsibility for any decisions onto Saru.

"I believe Colonel O'Malley would prefer you to remain here," suggested Saru.

Mischkelovitz glanced over at O'Malley's still-sleeping form. "I don't want to and I'm going to go."

"Very well, you may go and sleep, but I will expect a full report on the modifications you have made to your lab and the admiral may have questions for you. I know I do. Report to me once you are rested."

"Yes," said Mischkelovitz, glancing at Saru's collar. "Commander."

As Mischkelovitz walked out of sickbay, Saru thought it felt like things had gone back to the way they were when he first met her.

* * *

They materialized in the quarters Groves had formerly shared with Larsson. "—tastic, thank... damn it." Groves flopped down on the bed to the right with a sigh. "You can have Larsson's bed," he said, as if this were some form of hospitality and not the most obvious thing in the world.

The quarters were abysmally small. Two beds, a bit of storage space for each, a shared desk, and a meager bathroom. Lorca had assigned this exact ensign double to all the Lab 26 personnel as a preemptively punitive measure and now he was bearing the brunt of the indignity. Curiously, there was already a guitar on Groves' side of the room, rendering the violin a questionable necessity.

"They could've at least sent my clothes," grumbled Lorca, rummaging for a shirt among Larsson's things. Disappointingly, most of what Larsson had was white and all of it was entirely too big.

Groves rolled his eyes at Lorca's intrusion into Larsson's belongings and grabbed something from his own closet. "That would have tipped more people off. Here."

The shirt on offer was red. "Got anything black?" Groves handed Lorca a black t-shirt that had a strange white bug creature printed on it made out of little cubes. "What the hell is this?"

Groves stared impassively. "You don't know Space Invaders? And here I thought my childhood was deprived. How about I..." Groves remembered he was cut off from the computer and began swearing profusely—in English for once.

"Jesus, Groves," said Lorca in a mix of disparagement and mild admiration when the colorful tirade finally ended a full minute later. "Pants?"

Groves pulled all his clothing drawers open in an angry frenzy. "Whatever! Just take it all! I don't care!" Then he got back onto his bed and sulked.

They were barely five minutes in and this was already unbearable.

Lorca noted a certain bareness to Larsson's side of the room. The Swede had little in the way of personal effects, but most of what he did have on display were pictures of himself on various worlds, often with a freshly-caught fish or similar bit of sea fauna dangling on a line. In one image, he was eating dinner with Yoon and Morita. In another, he was laughing and Lalana was clinging to his back with the expression of a deer in headlights because that was essentially the only facial expression she had. Looking closely, though, it was possible to make out the mid-click position of her tongue.

By some miracle there was a single printed book in the room. Unfortunately it turned out to be a vanity copy of the one Larsson had written, _Gates of Hell: An In-Depth History of the Uanar-Barosic Wars [2066-2079]_. Lorca opened it up and read the dedication. _To the best Captain I ever had I dedicate this book._ Somehow, Larsson had managed to construct an eleven-word run-on sentence. The rest of the book's prose matched the dedication entirely save for the major difference that most of the other sentences were very, very long indeed. Lorca put the tome back down. He was not yet desperate enough to slog through it.

Out of nowhere, Groves asked, "Do you ever get the urge to just smash something into your face?"

Lorca stared. "No."

"Huh. Guess it's just me."

Grimacing, Lorca laid down and closed his eyes. When he opened them again it was to the sound of a violin being tuned and the cloying smell of sweet potatoes. He sat up, lip twitching in annoyance.

"They beamed in some dinner," Groves informed him. One of the trays was already eaten and the other was missing something from one of the compartments. "I took your dessert. I'd say sorry, but..."

Lorca decided not to take the bait and scooped up a spoonful of cold, orange mush. He lifted it a few inches into the air and turned the spoon sideways, watching the watery goop drip back down into the pile on the tray. It fell a little short of the meal quality he was accustomed to. "This isn't food. Isn't even a meal. There's no meat."

"Don't complain," said Groves, plucking the violin strings with his fingernail and adjusting the tuning. "You're getting off scot-free thanks to me. Cornwell bought the whole 'keep this quiet or we're all screwed' angle."

"You say that like it isn't true," noted Lorca, feeling this finally confirmed his suspicions.

"Oh, it's true. You'd better start accepting it, too, 'cause you're _juuust_ smart enough to be a danger to yourself if you start getting any more grandiose ideas, and you're definitely a danger to all of us. Every single person who helps you ends up worse off. Lalana, Melly, Mac. Now me. You're _human cancer_. I liked the other Lorca better."

Lorca shot Groves a wry frown. "You never met the man."

"Yeah, but he killed himself. That I can understand." Groves tucked the violin against his cheek and began to play.

To Lorca's surprise, Groves was good. Very good. Unfortunately, the tune he was playing was little more than a fluttering arrangement of tiny, tinny notes that repeated over and over endlessly. It clearly required technical precision, and there was something momentarily beautiful about it, but the beauty faded into repetitive annoyance. "What the hell is that?"

" _Fratres_ , sort of," said Groves, not missing a single note. If anything, he started playing it even faster. "It was my brother's favorite. I used to play it for him for hours."

"Well I hate it, so I'm telling you to stop."

"In a minute."

"No, now."

Groves turned his back to Lorca and went even faster. The notes became pinpricks, almost too fast to follow. Groves' arms shook violently at the intense effort.

Lorca flicked a spoonful of orange mush at Groves' back. He heard the tiniest squeak of a missed note, nothing more. He debated throwing the whole tray but, as bad as the food was, he needed to eat, so he reached down for one of his boots instead. That stopped the music in its tracks.

"Just for that," said Groves as he turned back, "I'm doing this the easy way." He went over by the door and resumed playing with his fingers so high up on the fingerboard they were almost to the bridge. This time, the sound was not a rapid succession of notes forming any sort of tune but a long, sustained series of high-pitched scraping noises.

It was excruciating. Lorca covered his ears. "Knock it off, Groves! You call that music!?"

"No, you idiot. I'm trying to hack the computer."

"With a violin?"

"Yeah. I can't whistle loud enough at the right pitch to pierce the door, but if I can get the strings just right, I can generate a sound wave that the computer will interpret as a command and then it's off to the races."

Lorca stared. "You're kidding."

"Nah, I'm just that good."

Lorca suspected Groves was lying and just making the noise to annoy him, but it was hardly the craziest thing someone had proposed in the past seventy-two hours and Groves was a bastion of sanity compared to Mischkelovitz. Lorca decided to bear it for a few minutes.

The initial attempt seemed to dissatisfy Groves. He retuned his strings and tried again. There was a pinging snap as one broke. Another adjustment, another attempt.

Groves struck a particularly egregious, painful high note that felt like the audio equivalent of bright lights and Lorca exclaimed in pain. "Sorry," said Groves, almost sounding sincere. He played the note again, even more sharply this time.

The door opened.

"Holy," began Lorca, amazed, but his amazement and Groves' elation faded quickly when they saw Mischkelovitz standing in the doorway.

Or at least, for a moment they thought they did.

"Ne'he kratis-kolht!" gasped Groves, violin and bow falling slackly to his side.

There was no flicker of understanding in Mischkelovitz's eyes. There was no flicker of anything, because while they may have been her eyes, the mind behind them was not. Instead there was a darkness, intense and enduring. She ignored Groves and addressed Lorca. "I'll have that tooth now."

"Petra," said Lorca.

Groves took a step back. He had seen Petrellovitz over the bridge feed when she first arrived on Discovery and been shocked by all her scars. He had also heard the news of her demise at the hands of L'Rell in the cargo bay. The woman in the doorway was impossible on two counts.

She also seemed not to recognize her own brother, which meant it was true. Emellia Petrellovitz had never seen what John Groves looked like when he was grown because she had killed her version of him almost twenty years ago. She failed to even register the resemblance between the man standing to her right and the boy whose last independent act had been to lunge at her with a kitchen knife as she sliced his arms off with an industrial fabrication laser.

Groves stepped away from her, backing straight into the wall. The violin and bow fell from his hands and clattered onto the floor. His mind raced as he tried to figure out how Petrellovitz had come to be here. None of the possibilities he came up with were remotely good.

The tooth was in the pocket of the blood-caked Terran uniform pants draped neatly across the back of the desk chair. Lorca retrieved it and held it out to Petrellovitz. "Here."

She darted forward, greedily snatching the tooth, but her focus on her prize was so all-encompassing she missed the look of determination on Lorca's face and realized too late that he had used the tooth to lure her in.

Lorca grabbed Petrellovitz's wrist, pulling her towards him and wrapping her in an embrace that pinned her arms to her sides. He had used the same move on Georgiou during the fight in the throne room, but this time, it felt like he had taken an ice pick to the chest as she slammed against him because he essentially had. He gasped painfully as his vision swam with spots. "Help me!" he wheezed at Groves.

Groves took one look at the squirming form of his not-sister and shook his head. "I'm not getting kicked again!" Apparently one physical altercation with his sister was enough to make him gun-shy forever.

Petrellovitz did kick, but only into the air, unbalancing Lorca and sending them both crashing back against the floor. A line appeared on Petrellovitz's neck as the seam of her new flesh tore.

"I'm gonna—I'll get Saru!" decided Groves, dashing out the open door. A second later he reappeared, hitting the external controls to seal Lorca and Petrellovitz in.

Petrellovitz struggled furiously and began to twist with the intent of kicking against the bed—a move that would seriously threaten the makeshift repairs in Lorca's chest. The anguished hiss of his breathing became a desperate whisper into her ear. "Petra! Petra, calm down!"

He released her and she bounced away. He rolled over onto his side in pain, inhaling shakily through clenched teeth and holding the breath until he felt in control again. When he exhaled, it was calmly. Then he sat up, resting his arms on his knees.

There was a smear of red across the white space invader on Lorca's borrowed shirt and a matching stain of red down the white of Petrellovitz's stolen Starfleet uniform. Petrellovitz herself would not have called it stolen because it fit as perfectly as if it had been tailor-made for her, just like Mischkelovitz's skin. How could you steal what was clearly meant to belong to you?

"You idiot," she scowled at him, pressing a hand to the gash on her neck. "Now they know it's me!"

"Believe me, Groves was halfway to that conclusion when you didn't answer him at the door."

The scowl twisted with annoyance. "Groves?" She recognized Corinne Narvic's maiden name and put the pieces together. Groves entirely had his mother's coloration: the same dusky brown skin, dark eyes, and dark hair. "You're telling me that's Johnny?"

Lorca shrugged and smirked. "Listen up. We don't have much time. How soon can you get your little mushroom transporter going again?"

"I'm done with mushrooms," said Petrellovitz, scanning the floor and spotting the tooth. It had landed under the bed in the scuffle. She crawled under to retrieve it.

"Unless you know of a better way for us to get back..."

"Back?" repeated Petrellovitz as she reemerged with the tooth. "Why the hell would I want to go back. For that matter, why do you?"

"Our people are counting on us."

Petrellovitz stared. "You lost, Gabriel. I'm not interested in watching you pick up the pieces or getting captured again because of you."

"Petra, you know me. I'll find a way. We can do it together, like Michael would've wanted. You can rule as an empress if you want. I'll back you."

"My god, you are pathetic. Good luck with that. I'm not helping you. I have research to do." She slipped the tooth into her pocket and stood up.

The door opened. Groves had returned with Saru.

"Commander!" exclaimed Petrellovitz in a voice an octave and a half higher than Lorca had ever heard her use. "Thank goodness you're here! I came to see my brother and he pushed me and said I was from the other universe! I'm not from the other universe. Here, you can scan me!" She pulled her sleeve partway up her right arm, offering it to Saru for inspection.

"Your brother is in sickbay," said Saru, confused.

"Other brother," offered Lorca, momentarily glad to see someone else on the other side of the reveal for once. He could see now why Groves enjoyed the mislead so much. It was so stupid and obvious in retrospect.

Saru was audibly bitter. "Mr. Groves."

"I..." Groves looked at the stranger masquerading as his sister and realized he was facing a dilemma. They both knew she was lying. They also both knew Mischkelovitz was gone and never coming back and there was nothing Groves could do to change this, except maybe lie like both their lives depended on it. "I'm sorry, Mischka. I thought... I guess I was wrong."

With a deep breath, Saru informed "Mischkelovitz" that, as innocent as her intentions were, she was not to be in this room. "Then can I speak to my brother for a moment?" she asked. "I promise I'll leave after and I won't come back."

"You may have five minutes," granted Saru.

The semisweet façade faded the moment Saru was gone. "You didn't have to do that," said Petra darkly.

"Yeah, well," said Groves, turning away from her. "You didn't trigger Saru's ganglia so I guess you're not a threat."

"Stay out of my way and that will remain true."

Lorca grunted as he used the table to heave himself back up. "So that's it? You're just gonna stay here and play pretend?"

"It's a clean slate," said Petrellovitz. "It's not pretend."

"These people are on the verge of losing a war against the _Klingons_."

"Whether they do or not doesn't matter. Humans, Klingons, money, power, love. All of these things are fleeting. Only science is eternal. You got in the way of my science, Gabriel, you and Michael both, with your piddling little power struggles and politics. All I ever wanted to do was pursue my research and everyone's always getting in the way. Not here. Here, I'm free to create a legacy that will stand the test of time. And they'll let me do it, too. Either side, whoever wins, will have a place for me. I'm only sorry I stuck with you as long as I did." She realized now, had she gone through the transporter herself instead of sending him, she could have had this universe months ago. She banged her fist twice on the door and Saru let her out. Out of the five minutes she had been given, she had barely used one.

Lorca could have called after her, tried to convince her with new promises and platitudes, but he knew it was pointless. Petrellovitz was gone and she was never coming back to him. The only reason she had stuck with Lorca to begin with was his promise of unfettered access to whatever research projects she wanted. For years that arrangement had worked for her, but now he could not provide any such access and she had no use for him.

Lorca sat down on Larsson's bed and pressed his face into his hands. Groves watched with wary concern. It was impossible to read the intent of Lorca's face when his expression was covered. Then Lorca shuddered as he inhaled and Groves realized he did not need Lorca's face to know what the former captain was presently feeling.

"I'm sorry," said Groves, and for the first time, he meant it.

"Don't you pity me!" spat Lorca.

Groves sat down opposite Lorca. "Never," he said. He reached under his pillow and pulled out something wrapped in a hand towel. "I think this is yours."

It was a cookie. Not the fortune kind, the regular sort with chocolate chips, purloined from Lorca's dinner tray. Groves had not eaten it, merely tucked it away to save for later.

Sighing, Lorca took the cookie and broke off a morsel. "You know, Saru's ganglia aren't infallible. I never tripped 'em."

"Why would you? You weren't actually a threat to us. I mean, you've done a lot of crap, but in your own way, you were trying to help."

The cookie did not offer the same comfort as its fortune-filled cousin. "I thought I was human cancer."

"Cancer is just cell growth gone awry," said Groves with a shrug. "Perfectly natural and necessary part of life. Anyway, I had to play along. Think about it. If we don't match history closely enough, we'll disappear just like the holo-recording did. History says you died. History also says Emellia lived long enough to record something that no longer exists. Which means..."

Which meant nothing Lorca did for the rest of his life would make a mark in history. It was his destiny to die a forgotten echo of another man, doing nothing, being nothing.

* * *

John Allan stepped out from the wall and was confronted by his own disappointment. Lab 26 was empty, exactly as it should have been at this point in history, but some part of him had hoped it would be otherwise.

After twelve years on this assignment, it was hard to let go. He had learned the hard way that history had a way of surprising you and he would have liked one last surprise. A chance to say a real goodbye.

He was still dressed in the Terran uniform he had been wearing at the moment of his exposure as a temporal agent. On some level, the black suited him. Temporal agents were supposed to be like shadows, watching and safeguarding history without being entangled in it, and the uniform made him look the part even if he had failed miserably at being a shadow in the end.

Literally at the end. Twelve years and no one had suspected a thing. At least now he knew why "John Allan" disappeared from the historical record during Discovery's time in the mirror universe. That had always been a question mark with this assignment. Now he knew it was because he had been exposed.

Allan had failed to be a perfect shadow, but he had completed both his mission objectives: first, to guard the scientists Mischkelovitz, progenitors of the research and development of temporal stasis field technology (a crucial advantage in the temporal war and subsequently a banned technology), and second, to bring back the data from Discovery's jaunt in the mirror universe, because on that count, the historical record was severely lacking. Now the future would have a full record of events from someone who had lived them. History had helpfully even preselected the man for the job centuries before his own birth.

With a full copy of Discovery security archives prior to the wipe in his pocket, Allan finally had everything he needed to report in and no further reason to stay here.

So why was this so hard? He touched a finger to Mischkelovitz's desk.

As he wondered this, the transceiver in his dental implant vibrated in alert, signaling the arrival of another agent. A shimmer of black materialized in front of him.

No, not another agent. He stared at his own face in surprise.

They were both wearing the black uniforms of the Terran Empire. For a moment Allan worried he had brought back his mirror counterpart, but something in the other Allan's eyes told him he was looking at himself.

"Hey," they both said at the same time, which was all the confirmation either of them needed to know where they stood.

The second Allan was holding a portable jumper in his hands. These were highly controlled devices typically issued only to transit agents, not active assets, because the danger of such devices falling into the wrong hands was tremendous. "I remember standing where you are," said the second Allan. "Which is why I know it's time for me to give you this." He held out the jumper.

Allan took it, confused. "Why?"

Allan II held up a silver holodisc. "Because of this."

The message was as confusing to Allan as it was miraculous. "Mischka in the winter, okay, but bells and pots...?"

"Null time," supplied Allan II.

"Ah!" It made perfect sense in context. Add a chronitic contaminant to the spore canisters. Allan smiled.

"The destinations are already preset. Here's the Crestian flu for Chaudhuri and the T-nox agent for the spores. Careful not to confuse them. I know you won't, I just had to say it because I remember hearing it. Safe trip."

The first Allan vanished. A second later he walked out from the wall. "You lied," he said, holding up the holodisc. "Where did this come from?"

The other Allan smiled. "The original timeline." He shook his head, overtly pleased for having succeeded in tricking himself so thoroughly. "It was brilliant, really. Do you see how she did it? How we did it?"

"You're not me," said Allan. He had figured it out when he was standing in front of the spore canisters and realized the only way he could have pinpointed the exact date and time she referred to as "the time the lights went out" was if he had lived something that matched what she described, and he hadn't.

There was also no way the recording could exist if they were in a closed loop which had never required the message's creation; like energy, temporal information had to come from _somewhere_. That meant the loop was not closed.

"No," confirmed the other Allan. "I'm not. I'm an echo from another timeline. A timeline where it took Melly thirty more years to finish Milosz's work and develop the temporal stasis field. That was her great contribution to history. She did it here, too, but thirty years sooner. Passing her own research notes back to herself. End result: no discernible change to the outcome of history."

Allan's eyes teared up because even if Mischkelovitz had not changed her role in history, her fate had been drastically altered and that mattered a great deal to him.

Allan II continued, "I actually tried to do the changes myself, but when I went to make the first one, I saw you doing it instead. Turns out I didn't need to do anything, I just needed to tell you to. The question was, when? Then I realized I just had to scan for the point where the jumper was active twice. This point here. So now, can I have my jumper back?"

Allan considered that.

"Come on," said the other Allan, beckoning with his hand. "It is mine. And they'll retrieve you when you activate your transponder."

Allan wasn't sure if he trusted himself. To him, this felt like his mirror counterpart. "What are you going to use it for?"

"I'm going to give that bastard a piece of my mind."

There was no need to ask what bastard the other Allan was referring to. Allan desperately wanted to give Lorca a piece of his mind, too. This way, it would be like he was, even if he wasn't the one delivering the message personally. He handed the jumper back to the other Allan. "Do me a favor, will you?"

"For you?" smirked the other Allan, because of course he was willing to do a favor for himself. "Anything!"

"Tell him I'll never forgive him for what he did to Melly."

"You got it. Do me a favor and don't tell anyone I exist?" Allan II activated his jumper and was gone.

The Allan who had been born into and participated in this version of the timeline lingered in the lab, wondering how the other version of him could be satisfied with causing this version of events. Lorca alive, Mischkelovitz dead and skinned, three monsters from the mirror universe roaming free in their universe. How could this possibly be an improvement on the original events? He took a moment to compose himself before activating his transponder for remote retrieval.

But then, the other Allan had only intersected with the timeline in this universe briefly. Once to see himself performing the necessary changes, once to deliver the instructions. He had not been hiding on Discovery and watching events unfold in real-time and seen the truth. So far as he knew from his scan of the historical record, Lorca was dead, Mischkelovitz had recovered from an injury caused by her implants, and everything had turned out the same in the end.

That was the information the temporal remnant known as John Allan had happily taken as justification to jump back and accompany Discovery to the mirror universe again. After all, he had a jumper and no one in this timeline knew he existed. Why not take the opportunity to torment the tyrannical Terran captain in the hours before his death? After that, he could go anywhere he wanted in time and, so long as he kept his head down, witness firsthand all of his favorite historical events. It was a time traveler's dream come true.

In the end, neither John Allan truly understood the nuances of time travel. All they could do was act according to the information they had, as they had always been fated to do.


	99. Sigh No More

A/N: Covers the remainder of episode 14, "The War Without, the War Within," and continues into episode 15, "Will You Take My Hand?"

I decided to split this chapter; I thought it was getting a little too long. That means technically there are still three left after this. Same content, nothing's being added, just slightly different numbering than I intended and hopefully a slightly easier reading experience.

* * *

As they walked down the corridor, Saru considered the woman beside him. "Scan me," she had implored, suggesting there was physical proof of her claim to be Mischkelovitz. She had said other things, too—things that confused him, like "my quarters" when Mischkelovitz did not have quarters and slept in a hidden burrow in the walls of her lab.

Then there was the issue of the implant overloading, wiping Mischkelovitz's mind clean, and a miraculous recovery. Equally confusing was Groves' panicked assertion this woman was Petrellovitz and subsequent reversal. This detail, at least, was potentially cleared up by a conversation he had once had with Groves and O'Malley about religion. _I'll take a comforting lie over a truth any day_.

Saru suspected Groves had done just that and the person walking next to him was Emellia Petrellovitz.

She was, for the moment, entirely docile. Saru sensed nothing that alarmed him other than the fact she was not who she claimed to be. She was making no attempt to retake Discovery and both the Mudd protocols and Brig Chess had been removed from the system, so it was unlikely she could.

He walked her to Lab 26 and wondered what to do. If she could fool scanners as to her origin and if Groves, her own brother, was going to back her claim, how to approach this without seeming entirely paranoid? He needed evidence.

The walls of the lab were open, panels stacked to the side of the door. Exposed conduits and controllers evidenced Tilly's efforts to remove Mischkelovitz's system modifications. Saru wondered if Petrellovitz would comply with the order to finish disassembling the lab to preserve her cover. "Now that your research into Klingon cloaks is no longer needed, I assume you will be leaving Discovery?"

"Why?" she intoned, voice low and hollow. "This is a science ship and I am a scientist. Provided the humans win the war, this seems like a fine place to work."

"Provided we _all_ win the war," Saru corrected.

Her face darkened as she realized her mistake. "Yes. Because there are so many aliens here."

Nothing in Saru's words should have tipped her off as to his suspicions, but she was making it very hard for him to pretend he did not know. "Dr. Mischkelovitz, are you feeling alright? Perhaps residual damage to your brain..."

"Tell me something. If Gabriel had told you who he was from the outset and asked you for a chance, would you have given him one?"

Saru was taken aback. His first thought was that she was saying these things because she had no intention of letting him leave the room alive, but nothing in her body language, tone, or demeanor indicated any sort of danger. Slowly, Saru said, "I would like to believe that we would have."

"Then, would you give me one?"

He could not answer.

"I realize I can't maintain this pretense as well as Gabriel did, but if you help me, I won't have to. I think his mistake was not trusting you." She did not trust Saru either, she was simply beginning to understand that in this universe, you had to make people think you trusted them if you intended to work with them.

Perhaps it was a mistake on Lorca's part, but it seemed more of an intentioned plan. "I think Lorca was in a far more confusing position. A position I now find myself in as well. I assume you have prepared some form of retaliation if I deny your request?"

"No. If you deny me, I'll simply leave this ship and continue on my way. You'll never be able to prove the truth about what I am, because the truth is, I am the me from this universe." This was it, the big bluff Petrellovitz needed Saru to buy in order to secure her place in this universe. "My neural implant—her implant. When the Klingon attacked me, I activated an emergency failsafe to transfer my consciousness into her body. Because our neural structures are identical, it worked. Unfortunately, there's no evidence of what I did, so it would be your word against mine and Johnny's." (Ironically, Petrellovitz had accidentally suggested something the real Mischkelovitz's implants could do, but then, the genesis of their ideas came from the same place, even if their expertise had diverged slightly.)

"There are security monitors in this room," noted Saru. "This conversation is evidence of the truth."

Petrellovitz pointed up to the corner. "It would seem your engineer has presently disconnected them." That was the problem with trying to disassemble someone else's undocumented changes. There was no telling what would happen in the process. "I can reconnect that for you. You can keep an eye on me if you want. I don't mind. I should warn you I prefer to work naked."

This conversation was not going at all how Saru had expected it. "I do not wish to assist you with this deception."

"Then I will leave the ship. We'll pretend this conversation never happened. After all, no one can prove it did."

"A mind meld would provide proof."

Petrellovitz stiffened. "Vulcans," she said disdainfully. A side effect of placing so little value on aliens was that Petrellovitz sometimes forgot that some species had abilities and advantages humans lacked. "Are you trying to convince me to kill you?"

"Certainly not. But I am not the one who can approve your desired course of action. I will present your offer to Admiral Cornwell."

"Please don't," she said flatly, her tone entirely impolite. "The more people know, the less credulous my denial becomes. The last thing I need is anyone in command learning about it. As it is, maybe I can... beat a mind meld somehow." She rubbed her chin thoughtfully. "I was hoping you'd give me a chance, as a fellow scientist. Allow me to prove my intentions. You're probably the most qualified person to run such an experiment. But if you're not interested, then let's forget I said anything and part ways. No mind melds, no need to go after one another. A truce."

Saru considered that. If Groves maintained his support of her, it was unlikely she would be convicted of any crimes based solely on a mind meld; they were easily challenged in trial. At best, she would be kicked out of Starfleet and then there was no telling where she might end up. If she remained on Discovery, he could enlist the aid of people he trusted and hopefully obtain enough evidence to prove her true identity and prevent her from running amok somewhere else.

There was also a chance, slim as it was, that she was sincere. The experiment she was proposing might be a necessary one now that there were three Terrans in this universe. "If I allow you to remain here, your access will be heavily restricted. You must also remain clothed while you are on duty."

"We'll see," said Petrellovitz.

"That is not optional, lieutenant."

Petrellovitz hiccupped, surprising herself. (Having never truly laughed, her brain was not quite certain how to do it.) "Commander? I won't pretend I'll like you, but..." She smiled, and while there was something predatory in it, there was also something curiously hopeful. "Michael was right. This is a world bursting with potential. In my universe, there was no one else like me, who loved science for its own sake. All anybody cared about was what science could do. Now it turns out there are people like me. Here, in this universe."

It was, thought Petrellovitz, Lorca's best miracle yet.

Sadly, there were no further miracles to be found in the lab. When she opened the Mischkelovitzs' research notes on quantum mechanics, Petrellovitz discovered they were all audio files in a language she did not understand. It seemed she was going to have to restart her research from scratch.

* * *

There was only one other person who could potentially stand in Petrellovitz's way, but as he woke up disoriented and confused in sickbay with no knowledge of the events of the past few days, his first concern was not his sister, or Groves, or even Lorca.

"Hang on, is this stardate right?"

The one person on Discovery for whom the knowledge of their nine-month misstep meant the most was the last person to learn it had happened. His reaction was utter panic. By the time Saru arrived, the nurse was attempting to administer a sedative.

"Don't you dare sedate me! Let me call my wife!"

"Colonel," said Saru.

"Oh, thank god. What is going on, commander?"

O'Malley was forlorn to hear the full scope of the news. He asked to look at the tactical map and Saru could see the grief and worry as O'Malley brought up the Antares sector in detail and watched a replay of nine months of battle actions in the space of a minute. "Oh god, oh god," he whimpered under his breath as Klingon strikes appeared and the sector turned red.

"There are many who are seeking news of their loved ones," said Saru. "Our best course of action for now is to continue the fight."

There was one other matter. Saru considered not telling O'Malley, not yet, because the loss of one loved one was probably enough for now, but he also knew how it felt to have painful truths kept from you. "I must inform you of another issue..."

He had never seen a human break like that before, to fall so completely into abject despair. It reminded him of L'Rell's reaction to realizing the Voq she had once known was no more. Then, her Klingon scream had seemed to shake the ship to its bones. O'Malley's whimpering wail did not rise to this level of ferocity, but it also did not resolve itself into a state of ultimate coherency, and when the nurse came again with the sedative, there wasn't enough of O'Malley present to object.

* * *

Their attempt to reach Earth under Cornwell's command was unsuccessful. The Klingons had occupied Starbase 1 and as Cornwell stared at the sigil of House D'Ghor on the side of a base that had once housed eighty thousand people and was now devoid of all human life, Saru learned something both Captain Lorcas had long known: Katrina Cornwell was not suited to starship command. She sat there in the captain's chair staring as Klingons closed in around them, unable to issue any orders, until finally Saru took charge and issued the orders for her.

Discovery fled. There was no victory to be won here, only a chance to live and fight another day, and because they might only ever get one more day, they had to make it count.

Emperor Philippa Georgiou smiled darkly when they came to her. A decisive strike to take down the Klingons was what they needed, and as repugnant as Georgiou found all the humans in this universe, she still hated nonhumans even more.

* * *

Discovery made its way to the Veda system to execute the first step in a last-ditch effort to win the war once and for all: grow a crop of _Prototaxites stellaviatori_ and restore functionality to the jump drive. They had a single sample of mushrooms to draw upon and the energy of a full set of terraforming probes to feed the crop. The ship fired the probes down onto the moon's otherwise barren surface and a forest of mycelial light sprang up below.

It was a lovely sight for Lalana to wake up to. She vibrated away the gel from her filaments and asked the computer to locate Lorca.

"Unable to comply," the computer responded. She asked for Groves and received the response again. Finally, she tried Saru, and this time she received an answer.

"Admiral Cornwell has been waiting to speak to you."

Lalana was utterly unconcerned with this information. "Certainly. Where is Gabriel?"

Saru was unable to answer this openly on the bridge, but Lalana had kindly provided him with an alternate narrative to fall back on. He answered, "His body has been incinerated."

"Well, that was rude, I would have liked to eat more of it," said Lalana cheerily and settled in to watch particles drifting in the air of her room while she waited for Cornwell. The wait was not a long one.

"You had better have a damn good explanation, or so help me—"

"Katrina, how lovely to see you. Can you tell me where Gabriel is?"

Cornwell responded with angry shock. " _Gabriel_ is _dead!_ "

"Not Hayliel, Gabriel. Or has the Federation instituted a death penalty for impersonating an officer in the time we have been gone from this universe?"

"You..." Cornwell took a deep breath. "Do you think this is a game?"

"Would you prefer if I adjusted my voice modulation to seem more serious? I understand you humans believe tone alters the meaning of words somehow. That has always been a very curious thing to me. How can one word mean a different thing simply because of the note that is struck by your vocal cords?" There it was, the crux of ten years of misunderstood communication. The monotonal lului tongue did not allow for tone variance in language.

It was easy to fall into Lalana's little verbal traps and engage her in one of her frivolous asides designed to distract from the actual subject at hand. Cornwell was having none of it. She said with resolute focus and angry determination, "You knew—this whole time—and you said _nothing_."

Speaking the words aloud, Cornwell found her breaths became labored and her eyes stung. The psychological effort required to finally confront the full truth felt like a massive physical undertaking and produced the same physiological reactions.

"What would you have had me say?"

" _The truth!_ "

Lalana's head tilted to the side. "I never lied to you about Gabriel. I always spoke the truth."

Technically that was true. In San Francisco, she had said point-blank that Lorca was not their Gabriel. She had simply neglected to explain why that was the case and had framed the statement between sentences that, to Cornwell's human ears, made it sound like there was an implication of metaphor in the words.

It was very possible that Lalana had never used an actual metaphor in her entire nine-hundred-year life. To her, the idea that someone might liken the sound of rustling leaves to falling rain made no sense, because these were two entirely different sounds. Similarly, that someone could believe the words "he is not our Gabriel" reflected a mere change in emotional state was ridiculous. The sort of ridiculous that made her laugh, so she played with words this way every chance she got, and in doing so simultaneously told the truth and kept Lorca's secret.

"Some people would call what you did a lie of omission," said Cornwell. "But that's letting you off too easy. What you did was unforgivable. You let that man destroy everything Gabriel stood for. You helped him do it."

"Is that what you think I did? Then you have not seen him for who he is. It's true that he is not your Gabriel, but he could become such if you would simply let him. He possesses much of what our Gabriel had."

"You can't _replace_ someone with their doppelganger," said Cornwell, shocked by the suggestion.

"I am not suggesting you replace him, but I did love Hayliel more than any other human I have ever met. More, in fact, than any member of any species I have encountered. There is no one like him. He is irreplaceable. However, I have found that there is great happiness in the fact I can continue to see his face even though he is gone. That is the face of the human I love. I am glad it still exists in this universe."

"Do you know what I see when I look at that man? A reminder that our Gabriel died and I didn't even _know_." The sting in Cornwell's eyes became unbearable and she squeezed them shut.

"Perhaps I should have told you. Because of the way humans view death, I thought it would make you happier if he were still living. I also thought, and I believe correctly, that this Gabriel Lorca needed to be a captain and have a command. He needed it more than anything and so I gave it to him. Thank you for helping me do that."

Cornwell shook her head, her eyes watering. "You tricked me. I can't forgive you, either."

"You can, but you must first forgive yourself."

Cornwell started to quietly cry. She knew how important forgiveness was but she would probably never forgive herself for not realizing the truth sooner. Even if the cards had been stacked against her by both Lorca and Lalana, she felt like she should have known.

"If it is too much, I understand," said Lalana. "Perhaps in time. I do think that Gabriel would like a chance for you to know him for who he is. That bitterness and rage he holds within him, you could help him with it. Perhaps even come to see, as I have, that he is in his own way a good man. He did not come to us as such, but we have made him that, Hayliel and I. We showed him how to be this man. That is how Hayliel lives on: in spirit." Her eyes glinted as the striations of her compound irises shifted.

If lului could cry, Lalana would have cried in happiness at the idea. Many years ago, she had expressed disdain for the human concept of spirit, viewing it as a peculiarly human folly. Only when she had invoked the concept to offer comfort at a time when Hayliel stood at a crossroads had she begun to understand what it meant.

Invoking it again now, she discovered she understood and believed in it. Perhaps it was simply a ghost of a memory, but so long as she had those memories, Hayliel was with her. He had never left her. In her mind she would never leave him.

Cornwell did not share this outlook. "No. He's gone and we both need to accept that."

"I will never accept that," said Lalana. "For as long as I live. And I can live for a very long time."

* * *

"I just want out of here. I can't take this."

Lorca looked up from Larsson's book. Groves was lying in his bed, plucking at the strings of the guitar on his chest and staring at the ceiling. He had abandoned the violin. Not, he said, because he could not hack the computer with it, but because he had realized there was probably no point.

"Stop fixating on it," advised Lorca. "The more you think about it, the worse it is."

The lights went out and they heard the toilet flush. The first time this had happened, Lorca and Groves had been left wondering if something had gone wrong on the ship or if this was some kind of punishment, but in the end they realized the lights and toilet were simply set to an automatic cycle. This, for whatever reason, was the hour someone had decided should be bedtime.

Groves fumbled in the darkness as he put his guitar away. On his return trip to his bed, he tripped over one of Lorca's boots and landed half on top of Lorca. Lorca pushed him off to the floor.

"What, you don't want to cuddle?" quipped Groves as he picked himself up. "With the lights out, you can pretend I'm Michael."

"Dammit, Groves, what the hell."

"Or would you rather pretend I'm Mac? I've seen the way he looks at you."

"You have a serious problem. Didn't your mommy ever teach you not to poke at bears?"

"Sure she did," said Groves, which was probably a lie, "but I'm an agent provocateur."

"You're something all right," sighed Lorca, rolling his eyes.

Groves managed to find his own bed. "Maybe I just like poking the bear and getting bit."

"Why? You like getting locked up? This fun to you?"

There was a long pause. "Makes me feel alive."

Lorca sighed again, this time in mild sympathy. Groves' bark was far worse than his bite. "I'll be sure to tell Mac what you said. He'll give you a good bite."

"Why would he do that?" Despite the darkness, Lorca thought he could hear the twist of confusion on Groves' face.

"That man is entirely too devoted to his wife."

"Maybe, but you're the new Anton."

It took Lorca a minute to remember where he had heard—or more accurately, read—that name. Anton Nguyen, from the QORYA trial transcript. The other male scientist on the project. "What's that supposed to mean?"

"It means all anyone's ever doing is reliving their own personal trauma. Whatever damage we get, we replay over and over again in our lives."

That, at least, was accurate.

Lorca wasn't the least bit tired and there was no way to read Larsson's book in the darkness, so he asked in his most pleasantly inviting voice, "We got nothing but time. How about it, who's Anton?"

The pause this time was very long. "That's not my story to tell," Groves decided.

The comms came online.

"We've all mourned the enormous loss of life due to this war," began Cornwell's shipwide announcement. As she decried their foes as lacking honor and outlined a mission to map vulnerabilities of the Klingon homeworld for a single, decisive strike against the heart of the Klingon Empire, Lorca rolled his eyes. At least the Federation was finally going to try and actually _do_ something instead of floating around space like a fleet of Klingon punching bags.

Then Cornwell said something that shook Lorca down to the very fibers of his being. With three words, she stripped him of everything.

"Allow me to introduce you to the person who will chart your course to Qo'noS: Captain Philippa Georgiou."

"Thank you."

"Though long presumed dead, Captain Georgiou was recently rescued in a highly classified raid of a Klingon prison vessel. She was transported aboard Discovery..."

Cornwell had found the perfect revenge.

As the rest of the announcement played out, Groves heard some sounds underneath it that did not at all match with his perceptions of Lorca. Uncomfortable, he got up and made his way to the bathroom, using the manual override to close the door. _This has nothing to do with me_ , he told himself, the same words he had thought to himself years ago as he hid in the QORYA facility walls and other children were dragged out screaming around him.


	100. The Captain's Secret

A/N: Concludes episode 15, "Will You Take My Hand?" Any resemblance to a certain deleted scene you might have seen on Youtube... that's not coincidental, it's that the show writers essentially reached the same conclusion I did. I just did not write fast enough to get my version posted before theirs. I realize no one has any reason to believe me on this count, but it's true!

Two more chapters and then we're done. Also, this is farewell to O'Malley and Groves, but say hello to a familiar face you probably didn't expect to hear from again.

* * *

Locked away in the bowels of Discovery, Lorca could only guess at the details of Discovery's present mission. He was aware when the spore drive engaged, jumping them to a location that made the ship creak under pressure, and aware when they jumped again, but entirely ignorant as to what happened in-between.

Lalana, however, was watching and listening to the bridge, so she heard when Burnham contacted Discovery from the surface of Qo'noS to inform them that what they thought was a mapping mission to locate military vulnerabilities was in fact an attempt to detonate a hydro bomb in an active volcano chain and cause an explosion that would render the whole of the planet uninhabitable. Worse, the bomb was already too far within the planet's crust to extract.

It was, to Saru and the rest of the bridge crew, an unthinkable atrocity. "Is this how Starfleet wins the war?" Burnham demanded of Cornwell. "Genocide?"

Cornwell was gone from Discovery now, back at Starfleet's current temporary command, far from the front lines where her tendency to freeze on the bridge would not undermine the efficacy of an active starship. Lalana listened as Cornwell responded to Burnham's criticisms by defending the decision as a necessary atrocity. "We do not have the luxury of principles!"

Saru rose from the captain's chair. "We are Starfleet," he said. Around him, Detmer, Owosekun, Bryce, and the rest of the bridge crew rose in support of their acting captain. They had been to another universe where humans committed these kinds of atrocities and they were determined to prove that they were different from the Terrans in every way that counted.

"What is it you're suggesting?" asked Cornwell, registering shame as she realized her proposal to destroy Qo'noS was more of a threat to Starfleet than the Klingon incursion. The Klingons could only physically destroy the institutions of the Federation. Cornwell's plan threatened to destroy the Federation's soul.

There was no reversing the course of the bomb, but they could give control of it to someone who could use the bomb's presence as a bargaining chip against the many disparate Klingon houses.

L'Rell was surprised when they returned her clothes to her and released her from the brig—even more surprised when they handed her the detonator controlling the bomb and told her what it was. "Klingons respond to strength. Use the fate of Qo'noS to bend them to your will," instructed Burnham. "Preserve your civilization rather than watching it be destroyed."

L'Rell had once followed T'Kuvma, a visionary who believed in a united Klingon Empire, all houses working together under a single banner of strength. She still believed in that ideal. Now she possessed a tool that would enable her to see this vision made manifest. L'Rell wondered what part her scarred friend from the brig had played in orchestrating this moment. From where she stood, her freedom seemed to be the culmination of Petrellovitz's promise, and more.

She stood before the assembled houses, revealed that she held the power to destroy Qo'noS in the palm of her hand, and the war ended not with the destruction of a planet, but with something almost approaching diplomacy.

* * *

"Prepare for transport" was the only warning given. Light shimmered around Lorca and Groves and they rematerialized in a proper guest room with windows and real seating. After what had been a long and exhausting night, the beam-out genuinely felt like escaping from a hole.

Saru was waiting for them. "Apologies for not releasing you sooner, a great deal has transpired. The war is over." This was a slight oversimplification. There were still Klingon stragglers, a few houses resistant to the idea of giving up on so glorious a victory even when their planet's fate depended on it, but the larger part of the Klingon forces had withdrawn.

"How?" asked Lorca. He watched Groves turn greenish at hearing how Cornwell had ordered the annihilation of Qo'noS. It was, Lorca silently thought, a tactically sound plan, as much as it reeked of Georgiou. Still. Some part of him was relieved it had not panned out exactly as intended. Discovery's crew— _his_ crew—had held fast at the crucial moment. He hoped that rankled Georgiou. "Where is she now?"

"She has been released, as per her agreement with Starfleet."

It seemed unthinkable. Georgiou was being allowed to go free and impersonate herself in this universe. "And _my_ agreement?" said Lorca.

"Arrangements are being made. I am not privy to the details."

Sighing, Lorca shook his head in disbelief. Cornwell had essentially taken everything he wanted and given it to Georgiou, right down to winning the war and being the great hero everyone would remember until the end of time.

"Now what?" asked Groves.

They were at Tri-Rho Nautica, the last remaining active Federation shipyard. It had become a crucial Starfleet installation, its repair facilities the only thing keeping the remaining one-third of the fleet operational, and more resources had been committed to its defense than almost anywhere else.

Now, the engineers at the shipyard were preparing to dismantle Discovery's spore drive and revert Lab 26 to its original design specifications.

"Whoa," said Groves to that. "Hold on. Does Mac know about this?"

Saru was reluctant to answer the question, but he did. "Colonel O'Malley is presently unavailable."

"Well, one of us has to be there!" Groves exclaimed. "Can I—can I be excused?"

Cornwell had ordered Groves and Lorca confined to Groves' room, but Cornwell was gone and word had come that no charges were being sought against Groves. "You may."

"'Unavailable?'" Lorca asked pointedly when Groves was gone. In the back of his mind, he was still mulling over the decommission of the spore drive. That had been his last and best chance of getting back home.

"I..." Saru pressed his fingers together. It was difficult to admit that he wanted to consult a man who had turned out to be a fake Starfleet captain, but for almost a year, Saru's captain was what Lorca had been. "I wish to ask you something. I am aware that you are close with Colonel O'Malley. I believe I may have made an error in telling him something..."

Lorca listened quietly. It helped a bit, having someone else's problems to focus on. When Saru was done, Lorca said, "You made the right call."

"He is... devastated. I did not realize it until recently, but Emellia was his sister."

"He never told you?" said Lorca, surprised.

Saru turned away, slightly annoyed. "I take it then that he did tell you." It had been Groves, actually, at that abortion of a dinner, but Lorca only nodded. Saru remained looking away from Lorca and brought his hands together. The situation clearly disturbed him. "I had thought the colonel and I were friends. It appears I was mistaken."

Lorca's tongue clicked lightly. "I wouldn't take it personally. He didn't like people knowing."

"Cadet Tilly was aware."

That sounded entirely bizarre to Lorca, but then, everything connected to Lab 26 tended to be. "I don't know what to say, Saru."

"I wish he had trusted me," said Saru.

"Sometimes... Sometimes it's not about the person you're lying to. By not telling you, he made it so there was one place he didn't have to be her brother. My guess is he was lying to himself."

Saru realized that statement applied just as much to Lorca as it did O'Malley. It was an entirely unintentional self-description, but it put into context many of Lorca's actions during his time commanding Discovery. "I am sorry."

"Sorry?" echoed Lorca, eyebrow raising and face twisting into a demand for something less nebulous than three generalized words.

"That you did not trust me with your secret."

Lorca considered that. "I would've," he said in a way that sounded like a promise. Out of everyone on the ship, Saru impressed him the most. The Kelpien had risen to the challenge of serving as first officer with bravery, intelligence, and compassion.

Saru's fingers gracefully pressed together one after the next. "Perhaps. We will never know."

Disappointment filtered across Lorca's face at the truth of it. He might have told Saru eventually, but more likely he was still lying to his former first officer and himself. He had always been too afraid of the consequences of telling anyone. Fear was the great constant in the Terran Empire and despite all the months in the Federation, he had yet to find a way to escape the emotion. Maybe in time he would have found the strength to tell the truth, or maybe he would have pushed aside the universe of his origin and hidden in the life belonging to the other Lorca forever. Instead, here they were in this moment, and neither thing was true.

* * *

"You look like death," was Lorca's greeting.

"Thanks," said O'Malley bitterly, despondent as he stared at some imagined point on the floor.

In all honesty, they both did at this point. Lorca was haggard from not getting enough sleep and O'Malley from getting entirely too much of it in sickbay—and both had received enough bad news in the past twenty-four hours to thoroughly remove whatever vestige of hope they had remaining.

At least Lorca was being permitted to keep the guest quarters for the moment, and Saru had been amenable to stocking it with a few necessities like clean clothes and bourbon. "Drink?"

O'Malley did not answer. Lorca poured out two drinks anyway and offered O'Malley one. O'Malley reached over, took the whole bottle, and went and sat in an armchair. With a faint shrug, Lorca tipped the first cup into the second and sat down on the couch opposite.

"You have some questions, I imagine."

O'Malley didn't drink from the bottle. He hugged it to his chest, one hand firmly gripping the neck. "No one could tell me what happened. Implant... overload?"

"Sort of," said Lorca, taking a deep breath. For the second time he found himself trying to explain Mischkelovitz's actions and falling far short. O'Malley stared off into space as he listened. Lorca concluded with, "I told her not to."

"Told her?" said O'Malley, voice soft and small. "You told her not to do it. You just... told her." His head shook back and forth. A tear rolled down his cheek and plinked quietly onto the bottle. He finally looked over at Lorca with a look of pained accusation. "You should have stopped her!"

"I tried," lied Lorca, because while he had attempted to talk Mischkelovitz out of it, some part of him had not wanted to stop her and he had failed to do the one thing he knew would have worked: woken O'Malley up.

O'Malley curled around the bottle. The inanimate object was probably more affectionate than his new fake sister Petrellovitz would be in the long run.

The explanation was not the main reason Lorca had summoned O'Malley. Mischkelovitz had died and Lorca felt obliged to fulfill her request. "She asked me to tell you something. A message. 'Just as much.'"

Closing his eyes, O'Malley exhaled until he could exhale no more. Words emerged in a soft, high-pitched trickle. "I never said it, did I. It seemed... I didn't hear it growing up and the first time I did say it was to a girl I had a crush on and she ran for the hills. Fair enough, I was a scrawny, spotty thing, it was entirely unrequited, and as you've pointed out, I don't look much better nowadays. But after that, it seemed... impossible to say, and when she said it to me, I couldn't say it back. I started saying 'just as much' and it became our thing. That way I never had to say it. I just said those stupid words instead."

O'Malley drank from the bottle at last, taking a hefty swig. Lorca sipped at his own drink. There was an additional fact in there that O'Malley kept to himself. Lorca had said "just as much" when they first met. A casual three-word utterance that had amused O'Malley with its accidental relevance and set off a cascade of events that Lorca would have ascribed to fate.

"How did I go twenty years without ever telling my sister I loved her?"

"Mac," said Lorca, shaking his head and actually smiling in amusement. For all the hours of entertainment Mischkelovitz had given him on the lab security monitors, he decided to fix at least one thing for her and her brother. "You told her you loved her every day and she heard you. It's not the words you say. It's the words you mean. That's what she wanted to tell you."

The words were an effective consolation to O'Malley. He drank again, just a small taste this time, and asked, "How are you holding up?"

Lorca lifted his cup as if toasting and said proudly, "One piece, thanks." It wasn't really an answer because the last thing Lorca wanted to do right now was think about his own problems, which seemed insurmountable. He would rather enjoy the distraction of O'Malley's. "So, tell me. Anton?"

There was only one person that question could have come from. "Please tell me you're not willingly making yourself messenger of John's torture."

"Depends. I told you my story. Seems you left a few things out of yours."

"I'm going to kill John."

Lorca snorted. "No, you're not."

"But I should."

"No argument here."

O'Malley sighed and gave Lorca what he wanted, as always. "James Narvic was the face of QORYA and the impetus for its creation. Anton Nguyen was... You could call him the shadow master of the whole thing. He was handsome, charismatic, suave, deadly smart, and slippery. Could sell a man his own shoes. Little bit like you. Entirely and exactly like you. D'you know, if I saw him now, I'd still..." O'Malley sighed deeply at whatever unmentionable intent had just popped into his head. "Well, what can I say? I suppose I have a type. Tall, dark, and jackass."

Lorca imagined Groves was having a good laugh right now and grimaced. At the end of the day, even O'Malley only apparently had feelings for Lorca because he was reminded of someone else, and worse, this pretty much destroyed the tiny sliver of hope Lorca had been holding out regarding the significance of O'Malley's marital status. "I'm not gay."

"I know. Why on earth would I want something I can actually have. It's not like I'd ever leave..." O'Malley froze. He fumbled with the bottle and attached it to his mouth and left it there with the impression he had no intention of removing it. The level of bourbon in the bottle visibly dropped by a quarter. Lorca reached over and pulled the bottle away. "Oh, come on! Give it back!"

"Drink yourself to death on someone else's bottle," said Lorca.

"How many months do you suppose it took them to declare us legally dead? Two? Four? I bet Aeree didn't even wait that long."

"At least you get to go back to being alive. I don't even get that," growled Lorca, betraying for a moment the extent of his lurking fury.

O'Malley's head tilted back. The alcohol was already hitting his bloodstream and he was not paying attention to Lorca. "He was the one named them Mischka. Anton. He used to call them little mice, and in his grandmother's tongue, 'mischka' means mice. D'you know, he got out first? Cracked a deal for early release. And I was glad! I helped him get it!"

"Since when are you such a lightweight," Lorca grumbled. While a quarter of a bottle was a lot of bourbon to imbibe in one go, O'Malley had never demonstrated such an embarrassingly quick and low tolerance before. Unbeknownst to Lorca, the last time O'Malley had eaten was in another universe, and then his meal had consisted of a fortune cookie. He was operating on several days of IV fluids at this point.

"When I met you, it was like, here we go again. I knew you from the first minute... Have you ever seen something so clearly you know what's about to happen and you're powerless to avert it?"

Powerless was not something Lorca typically felt. Fear, yes, but something within him always told him he had the power to change things and shape his own destiny. Even now when people were telling him he had to be dead to history and he felt like this was the end of everything, that inner drive remained, suggesting there was some way to wriggle out of this to a fate less awful. It was the only thing keeping him going. "Nope."

"Do you know my favorite part of it all? The way you compartmentalized us, controlled who had what information at what times. It was brilliant! I know. Turns out I don't mind being compartmentalized. I'm not _that_ claustrophobic. It's nice to have a little something to myself now and again."

Lorca decided to call Saru. Forget distraction, forget whatever Mischkelovitz thought Lorca was going to do to "fix" O'Malley, this was an abject mess he had no interest in dealing with. "Computer, contact—"

The door chimed. Lorca allowed entry, expecting this would clear the problem up entirely, because only Groves and Saru knew Lorca was in here and both of them were capable of taking O'Malley off his hands.

The woman who walked in was entirely unfamiliar to Lorca. He had never seen her before in either universe. She was medium-height, in her sixties, with a short shock of latte-white hair and a strong jaw. Her uniform indicated she was a vice admiral, but Lorca had studied the command structure of Starfleet down to the level of its captains as part of his subterfuge and had not encountered her anywhere in it.

O'Malley turned to see what Lorca was looking at and jumped unsteadily to his feet. "General Myers!"

No wonder he didn't recognize her, Lorca realized. This was O'Malley's mentor. She wasn't proper Starfleet, she existed somewhere in the unpublicized command structure of Internal Security.

Lieutenant General Janet Myers looked at her protégé and judged him to be drunk. "Really, Mac? It's fourteen hundred hours." She had a twang that came from somewhere deeper in the American countryside than Lorca's did.

O'Malley wavered. He looked very much like he was going to fall over and Lorca tensed, expecting O'Malley to get a well-deserved dressing-down.

Contrary to expectation, Myers dropped all pretense of formality and asked with genuine concern, "Are you okay?" O'Malley managed about two seconds before he shook his head and began crying. Myers embraced him and O'Malley blubbered something unintelligible into her shoulder. "You and your monsters."

They remained like that for a good minute, Lorca standing off to the side like an afterthought. Myers finally patted O'Malley on the back and released him, turning her attention towards Lorca. "Well," she said with something approaching wry amusement. "How are we going to spin doctor this?"

"How about in a way that gets me back my ship," said Lorca, crossing his arms to mirror the cross expression on his face.

Myers smiled faintly as she shook her head. "He's ballsy, just like you said. Here's how this works. Tit for tat. If you're straight with me, I'll be straight with you. I can get you a command, but it's not gonna be what you think. As far as regular Starfleet goes, you are dead, and from what Johnny tells me, you need to stay dead or history is gonna come knocking and she is a harsher mistress than I."

There was a lot of information to parse in that. Lorca immediately gleaned that Myers was the origin of O'Malley's little fair trade shtick and that she had come prepared to offer him something that might be commensurate with what Starfleet had given Georgiou, albeit with some additional strings attached.

"I'm listening," said Lorca, deciding he liked Myers. She was quick on the draw.

"Black ops. You're a little old for a commando, but you're good with tactics. There are places the Federation wants to influence that we don't exactly have jurisdiction. Complete disavowal of your actions. New cover identity. No allowances made for contacting anyone from your old life. That won't be a problem, will it?"

Lorca started to smile. "What old life?"

O'Malley was stricken. Myers caught the look, frowned at her underling, and said, "You know the rules, Mac. No more pets."

"But—"

"I already let you have the one."

This was not the answer O'Malley wanted. He started crying again, partly because he knew his wife had abandoned him for dead months ago in this universe, partly because he was upset at the fact this was more upsetting to him right now than losing Mischkelovitz, and entirely because the alcohol had completely overtaken the IV fluids. "Then I quit! I'm done! I don't want to do this anymore."

Unphased, Myers flipped open her communicator. "Myers to Quelron. Ree, stop sniffing around the cargo bay and get in here already. Your husband is losing his shit."

The crying stopped. "Aeree?" But Myers had already closed her communicator.

"You can thank me later."

Thanks were not going to be the next thing to come out of O'Malley's mouth. His shoulders gave an involuntary jerk and he dashed to the bathroom to throw up. Lorca chuckled. This was kind of great. He tilted his head towards Myers and said, "Level with me. The reason you took Mac on, guilt? Pity?"

Myers squinted as they watched O'Malley's back through the open door. "Why would you say that?"

"The man's got no useful skills and he's a drunk, emotional wreck."

The twinkle in Myers' eye was entirely knowing. "Is that what you think? He's got the only skill that matters in our line of work. He can put himself in someone else's shoes and completely see things their way. He's taken the side of every criminal he's ever sat down with. Gives us everything we need. Without that, well, you'd be up shit creek without a paddle, wouldn't you, 'captain?'"

Lorca's lip twitched.

Myers smirked. "Course, I don't think he's coming back from this one. It was only a matter of time before he snapped and threw the baby out with the bathwater." She was remarkably frank as she essentially deconstructed O'Malley in discussion with a man she barely knew. (She knew more than Lorca realized. O'Malley was not the only person who reported to her about Lorca, and the other operative had already submitted an informative initial report.) "This is something else, though. You seem to have broken him fairly thoroughly."

"Admiral Cornwell took a few whacks first," said Lorca. His own drawl was growing more pronounced in response to Myers'. "She had him trying to serve two masters. That never ends well."

"Geez. That woman is too emotional. They both are. You know what happens when you put two people that emotional in a room together?" A beat. "If you're lucky, they run out of oxygen." She laughed quietly at her own joke.

Maybe Lorca would never have told Saru the truth, but he suddenly had the impression that if he had met Myers sooner, he would have told her because she was entirely, disarmingly appealing. He suspected this was a calculated gimmick on her part. Probably everyone felt this way when they met her. O'Malley was a fumbling, meandering mess in comparison; Myers was the master he was trying to emulate and not quite managing to.

"You're not Terran, are you? 'Cause you'd fit right in where I come from," said Lorca, meaning it as a vague disparagement.

"Thank you," said Myers, who found that idea about as disparaging as a bowl of home-cooked grits.

Lorca wondered who, where, and what Myers was in the Terran Empire and why he had never met or heard of her. Perhaps she was that rare individual whose Terran counterpart was not as formidable as this version of her. Perhaps she'd simply died before his time. Lifespans were a little shorter for Terrans on average.

They watched O'Malley move from the toilet to the sink and rinse out his mouth. Myers took a turn asking a question. "I've been wondering something myself. How'd you know that Mischkelovitz'd be the one to pull off your little plan?"

"I had one in my universe," said Lorca. The way Myers phrased it, Lorca guessed she did not know his version was the one currently on the ship.

"Only one? They're much better as a pair."

Lorca frowned thoughtfully as he recalled Emellia Mischkelovitz's desperate and likely doomed desire to unite with herself in another universe. "I think they'd agree with you, general."

O'Malley emerged from the bathroom looking slightly less worse for wear as the door chimed again. The alien who entered was grey-skinned, a full head taller than Lorca, slim and graceful, with red slits for eyes. The silken white gown she wore shifted as she moved, fabric seeming almost to float on the air. There was a statuesque beauty to her.

O'Malley was elated to see his wife, but before he could manifest this elation into some form of happy embrace, Aeree sniffed at the air and her eye slits widened almost into orbs. Her head swiveled towards Lorca. "Why do you smell like my husband!" When her mouth opened, it revealed sharklike rows of frilled teeth. The sense of ethereal beauty from five seconds earlier was completely lost.

News of the transfusion did little to quell Aeree's anger. "If you ever take my husband's blood again, I will drink every drop you contain. And you, if you ever give your blood without my permission..." This admonishment continued out into the hall. Lorca and Myers did not see the conclusion of it, which would have revealed to them both it was not a true admonishment at all.

"She's a real peach," said Lorca.

"Peach pit, more like. But she's useful. Formidable species, Misellians. I'd stay on her good side if I were you."

Lorca heard the implication in there and raised an eyebrow. "Now why would I have to do that, general?"

"Senior operative assigned to you requested my best, and Aeree is as good as they come."

"Your best person is married to O'Malley? Come on, now."

"It's an incestuous little department I run," admitted Myers, though the truth was a little more nuanced than her words belied.

Lorca snorted, enjoying the pun. "As for this senior operative... It's not a command if there's oversight. I don't need someone looking over my shoulder." As far as he was concerned, Cornwell and Terral's attempts to do just that had been part of the problem the first time around.

"Don't think of it as oversight. Think of it as backup. At least till you've learned the ropes."

"You can't call a spade an onion with me."

"And you can't have a command without some conditions. I'm not trying to put a fox in a dress here. It's a pretty reasonable request for you to work with someone we trust. So what's it gonna be?"

* * *

The engineers were already at work when Groves arrived in the lab, crating up every loose item and carting out furniture. Petrellovitz was nowhere in sight. "Who's in charge?" Groves demanded.

"I am," said a gracefully athletic woman with thin lips and faded blonde hair pulled into a bun. Her uniform identified her as a commander.

"Great. Commander..." Groves extended a hand.

"Billingsley," she supplied. She did not extend a hand in return. Instead, she glared at him with barely-restrained bitter disapproval. "Are you the one responsible for this mess?"

"No, but I am the one who's gonna help you clean it up," he grinned. She rolled her eyes at that. There was something in her glare that intrigued Groves. "I'm John, but you can call me Rove. My friends do."

Her eyes narrowed. "Are we friends?"

She was extremely defensive. Delightfully so. "No, but maybe I can take you to dinner and fix that?"

Billingsley scoffed at him and directed her underlings to fill the crates so they could begin the real work in the walls. Only once the piles of engineering detritus were gone did they begin to remove panels and the full scope of the task came into focus. The modifications requiring reversion were not restricted to Mischkelovitz's secret null time spore project. There were also the many cubbyholes she had specified in her schematics, the double-door security lock, the reinforced plating to prevent anyone from transporting into the lab and accidentally displacing Lalana, and Lalana's room itself. The engineering crew worked from the back of the lab to the front, meaning Lalana's area was the first part to go.

They did not finish the work the first day, nor did they seem to appreciate the man hanging around watching and waiting on them to finish. "Is there somewhere else you'd rather be?" asked Billingsley the following morning.

"And miss seeing your smiling face?" replied Groves. Billingsley growled and looked away, but every time she glanced over at Groves, she saw him smiling at her unreservedly.

When the engineers removed the section of wall behind Mischkelovitz's desk, her hidden sleeping alcove finally revealed itself. This was what Groves had been waiting for.

The clutter inside matched the former clutter of the lab at large. The difference was that the items in the secret room had no engineering use; they were everyday objects, a random collection of things that, at a glance, had no reason for being in there.

The largest of the collected objects was an old red guitar. Groves practically shoved the engineers out of the way to retrieve it. "She did have it!" he exclaimed, retreating with his prize. "I knew it."

"What the hell is this?" asked Billingsley, peering at the blankets and assembled objects lining the compartment.

"It's a pattern." Groves felt a momentary pang of despair. Each item represented someone of importance to Mischkelovitz. There was a set of nesting dolls belonging to Milosz's mother Agnieszka, an old leather suitcase belonging to O'Malley, a threadbare stuffed bear that had once been Milosz's, and a lock of Faiza's hair. This was Mischkelovitz's way of keeping the people she loved with her when they could not fit through the door to her hiding place. There was even a bowl Saru had eaten blueberries from and a glass tumbler O'Malley would have recognized as belonging to a set in Lorca's original quarters. "Box it up and make sure none of it gets damaged."

"I'm sorry, your rank is?" said Billingsley, glaring daggers.

"Grand Vizier," declared Groves, settling down in his chair on the other side of the room and tuning the guitar.

"You should know I have no sense of humor."

"Oh? Who told you that?"

Billingsley sniffed disdainfully and looked away. "Your friend Gabriel Lorca."

"I hate that guy!" exclaimed Groves, with such earnest emphasis it was clearly the truth. "He's wrong, by the way. I can tell you're laughing right now."

Billingsley looked at Groves again, her face seemingly impassive, her lips a thin line, but then the laughter wasn't on her lips. It was in her eyes. It had always been there, even back in 2247. Lorca had missed it entirely. Groves could see it just fine.

Groves strummed the guitar experimentally and continued tuning. Billingsley ignored him initially, but then he plucked a few notes of a tune, testing the sound, and began to play.

"Pale, pubescent beasts roam through the streets and coffee shops..."

"Do you mind? We're working," scowled Billingsley after the end of the first verse.

"Just a little accompaniment to pass the time," replied Groves, playing in an extra set of bars to keep the tune going uninterrupted. She would have interrupted during the intro if she really wanted him to stop. He resumed, "Young uniform minds in uniform lines..."

The first song ended. Groves began another. "Katherine kiss me, slippy little lips will split me, split me where your eye won't hit me..."

Billingsley pretended to ignore him. She seemed as cold and unflinching as ever to most of the people around her, but Groves could see the laugh, the smile, the pretend. When the work was finished, she sent the rest of the team away and remained behind. "Dinner," she said, spitting the word sharply at him. "One condition."

"Name it."

"Let's see your teeth."

That, Groves decided, was the most delightfully strange request imaginable and he couldn't wait to find out why she'd made it. He bared his teeth for inspection. They seemed to pass muster. Billingsley sniffed in approval and almost smiled.

"So what do I call you?" asked Groves. "Commander seems a little formal."

"Sarah," she said. They set a time and place and she left just as a lightly hungover O'Malley arrived to collect the box with Mischkelovitz's belongings.

"I'm gonna marry that woman," declared Groves, staring at the door with a delighted grin.

"Then she has my sympathy," said O'Malley, wondering how Groves could even think of such a thing while he was holding a box of everything they still had left of their sister.

The answer, of course, was that sometimes when you met someone for the first time, you just knew that you were willing to give them everything you had. Maybe because they were an alien from an unknown species asking for your help, or because they possessed a unique fearlessness even while hiding under a table, or there was a laugh hidden in their eyes only you could find, or simply because they happened to say your three favorite words. Regardless of the reason, it was the closest thing to fate there was.

* * *

At last Lalana turned up. She was so late coming he had begun to wonder if she was coming at all. "Apologies for not being here sooner, I have been very busy making arrangements."

"That's fine," said Lorca. He would have minded, but between Myers' proposal and the sobering particulars of his current situation, there had been plenty to occupy his thoughts.

He was presently sitting on the couch with his feet up, Larsson's book in hand. Groves had dropped it off as some sort of peace offering. At first, the run-on sentences had been kind of annoying, but Larsson's literary voice was moderately amusing and the Uanar-Barosic Wars were an unknown conflict in Lorca's universe, so the content in the book was all new to him. Lorca tilted the cover towards Lalana so she could see he was honoring her dead friend with his choice of reading material. "I've been keeping busy. Sorry about Larsson."

"No, you are not," said Lalana. She crossed over to Lorca in three and a half strides, stepping easily across his legs and flopping onto the couch beside him. "But that is all right. I am glad you found him in the end."

"His book anyway."

"That is the best part of him." She knew that better than anyone. "Discovery will be leaving soon, so it is also time for us to go."

"Us," said Lorca in clear judgment of the unilateral decision-making her words suggested.

"Yes. Unless you wish to live in this room for the rest of your life. I do know how much you love Discovery, so perhaps Saru would let you." She pressed her tongue to the roof of her mouth, essentially biting back laughter.

"A gilded cage is still a cage." No amount of love for the ship was going to make confinement to a single room aboard it palatable. Besides, there were things on this ship Lorca was desperate to get away from. He'd come to that conclusion after a considerable amount of thought, abandoned as he had been by everyone for most of the past day.

Lalana's tail swept through the air in a whimsical circle. "Then let us fly out together."

Lorca clucked his tongue, which from him was an admonishment, not a laugh. "It's kind of you to offer, but I got some stuff brewing of my own."

"Oh? Do tell!"

He took a deep breath. "They offered me a command. Nothing fancy, few officers and a ship. Guess someone out there realized what an asset I've been for Starfleet, past nine months notwithstanding."

"But of course they do. Had we never left this universe, you would have eventually won them the war, provided Discovery remained under your command."

"Let's not relive that again," said Lorca with a grimace. The what ifs were a rabbit hole he needed to avoid for his own sanity.

"Apologies. What do you know of your new command?"

"It's an off-the-books operation, cloak and dagger. Head off into the reaches and do things the Federation wants done without anyone connecting it to them." Honestly, that was the worst part of it. Lorca knew this universe wasn't perfect, but the wide-eyed idealism here was something he admired, and this black ops business spat in the face of it.

Lalana saw a flicker of disdain. "You are not happy about this?"

"It's not very Starfleet, is it? And there's the fact it'll mean putting aside going after Georgiou, at least for now."

"Now that she is the hero of the war, I do not think you can kill Georgiou without being revealed."

"Doesn't mean I shouldn't try."

"That is exactly what it means, Gabriel."

This topic was another angry dead-end for them both. Lorca was dangerously close to snapping at Lalana even though they both knew she was neither the crux nor the cause of the problem, it was the ridiculous threat of somehow collapsing reality. That vanished holodisc was starting to make even Lorca think there was something to it. He'd been in the room the whole time and could not figure out where the disc had gone. Vanished from time was as good an explanation as any.

Lalana shifted to a different tangent. "Have you met your crew yet?"

"One of 'em, apparently, is Mac's wife. I met her. She's... hard to forget, I'll say that." (Cornwell had met Aeree once, too, and would have described her the same way.) "There's also some 'senior operative' who's supposed to oversee me. We'll see how long that lasts."

"I would expect it to last a long time. Assuming, that is, that you accept the offer. Otherwise I suppose I shall have to find something else for us to do."

He heard the plural again and began to smile. Since returning to this universe, there had been very few moments containing any sort of genuine humor. O'Malley vomiting was the closest he had come to laughing at anything. "Arrangements." He snorted and shook his head. "You..." He started laughing. "You little minx!"

Lalana's tongue clicked rapidly and her hands spun. "I am sorry, I could not resist! That was what Hayliel and I would call an effective joke."

Her security clearance, her intelligence work, her friends in high places and enduring loyalty to his face. He should have seen it coming. "How am I gonna get rid of you?"

The laughter was written on every cell of his face. Lalana saw the stars returned to his eyes, "Why, Gabriel Lorca, would you even try to?"

His laughter finally faded into a sigh. "If I met you in my universe, I'd would've killed you."

"Then it is good we met in mine."

Then another sigh, raspy and melancholy. "I don't know if I can do this. I don't fancy being some dusty footnote in history."

"Simply because you must remain hidden does not mean you cannot make a mark on history. You simply cannot make it as yourself."

"Then who am I supposed to make it as? Captain Nemo?" He did not need her to answer because the moment the name left his lips he realized the truth of it. That was exactly what he was supposed to do. That was what Nemo had done, too, in taking the name. "All right. I'm in."

Lalana watched the spreading satisfaction on his features and quietly spun her hands. He had seen a path he could run and she was ready to run it with him. "Excellent. The ship is still a few hours out. Are you enjoying Einar's book?"

"There are a lot of run-on sentences."

"Yes, that is how Einar wrote. Will you read it to me?"

"Sure." He found his place and began. "In the second quarter of the fall season three scouts of the Seventh Durallan Legion were engaged in locating a rumored source of tritanium in the Karser Sector when they came across sixteen Barosic cruisers hiding in the debris field of the Battle of Kallam-Horical who were in the process of refurbishing derelict Uenar ships with the intent to execute..."

Hearing the words spoken aloud, Lalana recalled the truth she had learned from the first Lorca. Words really did hold the power to keep the people you loved alive. Right now, they were both of them alive, Hayliel and Larsson, thanks to the survival of another universe's Lorca.

* * *

Lalana left Discovery first, but because she had to travel by shuttlecraft, she would arrive at the new ship after everyone else did. Lorca used the opportunity to review some personnel files Myers had sent, as well as a list of potential missions they might dive into at a moment's notice. Officially, Lalana had final say for all of it, but Lorca had a feeling she would go along with whatever he wanted up to and eventually including hunting down Georgiou when the time was right.

Aeree's skillset was a little terrifying. Essentially she was a bloodhound who could shoot a phaser but would rather slice things open. "I can taste fear on the air," she informed him. "As well as lust and sickness and kindness. Do you know what I taste on you?"

"Your husband's blood?" offered Lorca dryly. She hissed through her many teeth at him.

"Impotence!"

He tilted his head and fixed her with a look. "Yep. More sex, less consequences. Don't foist your lack of children on me. I made that choice for myself. You got anything else?"

They were going to get along horribly. Even bringing O'Malley into the room to try and mediate failed to produce any promising common ground. They would have a few more days to try because O'Malley was going to hitch a ride and make up for time he had missed with his wife, but Lorca was ready to write the whole thing off after ten minutes.

The only positive was that the occasion seemed to merit some social lubricant, so at least they were standing around with drinks. Then it turned out Aeree preferred to drink her alcohol through her husband, and since O'Malley had finally eaten a few square meals, he was not drunkenly falling over himself for Lorca's amusement.

It also turned out O'Malley had decided he was done with space for the foreseeable future. "It was Melly who loved starships. She hated staying still. Maybe I'll finally get that cat."

Lorca was a little disappointed as he stared at the smear of bourbon remaining in his glass. While he had no official use for O'Malley, unofficially, he was going to miss the comic relief. He sighed and asked Aeree, "But you like starships?"

"No," she said. "They're means to an end."

In the middle of this ill-fated search for commonality, Groves wandered in with news to share and no one else to share it with. "I asked her to marry me!" he announced, pouring himself a drink.

O'Malley was horrified. "That engineering woman? You've known her for twelve hours!"

"No, I've been dating her for twelve hours, I've known her for two days."

"Groves, get out of here," said Lorca, but not only did Groves not leave, he launched into an enthusiastic ramble on the finer points of his new love, "Rah." She sounded like a real piece of work, whoever she was. "And this woman agreed to marry you?"

"No, but I'll keep asking."

"John, that's ridiculous, you can't stay here. You're coming home with me." O'Malley had by this point realized the abandon with which Groves was throwing himself at some unknown woman was probably a coping method to deal with Mischkelovitz being gone. (Lorca had realized the same and reached that conclusion within four minutes rather than the twelve hours it had taken O'Malley.)

"I'm not going with you," said Groves, returning to his usual veneer of casual boredom. "I've got work to do here."

Lorca could see the rising panic on O'Malley's face and knew it had nothing to do with present circumstances and everything to do with the way Groves had responded to family deaths in the past. "Really? Starfleet's gonna keep you on?"

Something came over Groves. He straightened, looked at them all with determination, and said, "Someone needs to hold Cornwell and the rest accountable. I know I said I wasn't ethical, but she seriously considered destroying an entire planet. More than that, it was the Klingons' homeworld. What kind of person even considers that? Someone who shouldn't be in command in Starfleet, that's for sure."

O'Malley shifted his weight, glancing at Lorca. He knew Lorca had done something of similar evil on a much smaller scale aboard the Charon when he deployed Georgiou and Stamets' weaponized spores.

If O'Malley had been smarter, he would have seen the trouble Lorca saw in Groves' future. Anything Groves did regarding the hydro bomb on Qo'noS was going to potentially undermine the tentative new peace. Groves was about to poke one of the biggest bears in the galaxy.

Lorca put a hand on O'Malley's shoulder in some sort of reassurance and said, "Sounds like you finally have a purpose, Mr. Groves."

Groves scrunched up his face in distaste. "Took a while, but I guess I got there in the end. Sort of thanks to you? There's some cosmic irony in that the person who showed me what Starfleet was wasn't even Starfleet himself. Guess it's true what Mac says. You really do give everyone exactly what they need."

Lorca's eyebrows shot up and he tilted his head, looking down at O'Malley. "Suppose you had to choose between me and Anton..."

"Oh my god, I'm going to kill you," intoned O'Malley flatly.

Lorca laughed and yanked O'Malley's shoulder, half-staggering the smaller man a step, then slid an arm around O'Malley's neck. "There's no one I'd rather have do the deed."

O'Malley's face split into a smile and he chuckled happily, flushing red. "I hate you!" he laughed, shaking his head.

And with a glint in his eye, Lorca said, "Just as much."

Weirdly, this was the moment Aeree decided she liked Lorca.

* * *

The last person Lorca spoke to on Discovery was also the first person he had welcomed into its crew. The change between now and then was immense. Gone were the deference and trepidation that had marked their first meeting a year earlier. In their place stood a truly formidable commander. Lorca smiled with subtle pride. "Well, captain, guess this is goodbye."

Saru's head tilted in respectful disagreement. "I have not been promoted. I am merely acting captain until our new commanding officer is appointed."

"Captain Saru," insisted Lorca. "I'm leaving Discovery in your hands. Far as I'm concerned, there's no one better for the job."

Saru considered that. Just like Lorca before him, he was a captain with a secret. He could have resented Lorca for it. Instead he felt sympathy. The position of holding a secret was not an easy one. "Your confidence means a great deal to me."

There was a glimmer in Lorca's eyes. Not full tears, but enough to show how much those words meant to him and how much he was going to miss this ship and its crew. "Thank you for everything, Mr. Saru."

And for the last time Lorca would ever hear it, Saru replied, "You are welcome, Captain Lorca."


	101. The Memory of Your Heart

A/N: There is a scene referenced in this chapter that took place in episode 15 and was not included in this fanfic. Just want to make sure the non-show watchers know they didn't miss anything I wrote; the scene didn't really fit in this story except as a moment of reminiscence. If you rewatch this scene with a mind towards the context it's presented here, though, it really is pretty unnerving.

I'm at the big Star Trek convention in Vegas through Sunday if anyone wants to drop me a line.

Also, hey, did you catch that the titular captain is Saru? Yep. Planned that one from day one. He ended up with a different secret than originally intended because Lorca lived, but it was Saru all along.

* * *

The lobby of the opera house was stunning. Swirl-patterned windows rose three and a half stories tall with terraced levels of curving wood and white walls that caught the reflected light of the moonscape outside. Blue and purple plants native to Vorasa system cascaded down like a waterfall of life from the top level, weaving down towards the garden on the first level with bursts of orange and green flowers.

"This is incredible," breathed Tilly, barely able to catch her breath at the sight of it.

Next to her, Stamets was more concerned with the tickets. He smacked his hand twice on the side of the holoticket and the seat numbers fritzed into view along with live directions to reach them. "There we go."

"Couldn't you just live here? If there were beds, I mean, and..." She trailed off, uncertain what else living in a space this immense would require.

"It is stunning," admitted Stamets. There was a time when he might have come here and found the architecture preferable to the music. Now he felt capable of appreciating both.

"Wow," said Tilly, head tilted up towards the ceiling, her feet following the movement of her eyes across a series of rippling metal ribbons arranged along the ceiling. There was a soft impact as she backed into another guest, almost tripping over the trailing hem of a gown. The Bolian she had collided with turned to look at her with wide-eyed surprise. "I'm sorry! I'm so sorry, I wasn't looking—"

The Bolian smiled at Tilly. "It's fine," the woman assured her, sweeping the shimmery, peacock purple fabric of her floor-length gown to the side. "Your first time?"

"Yes," Tilly nodded, excitement overcoming her fluster.

"Enjoy your visit," said the Bolian kindly and resumed her conversation with her companion.

Stamets watched the exchange with a smile of his own. "Making new friends everywhere we go," he gently teased. "Shall we find our seats?" They followed the instructions on the ticket to the middle terrace level and the far left of the auditorium. The theatre itself was shallow but tall—as tall as the lobby—with multiple levels of seating stacked almost on top of one another so every seat had a view of the stage, with the preference being for the audience to be above the performers but a stone's throw back, rather than deep and far away as most theatres on Earth. Elegant scalloping behind the stage directed the sound from the base up towards the top. At the moment, the sound consisted of a gentle, whispering murmur of patrons seeking seats and the orchestra members taking their places, punctuated by notes of instrument tuning.

"We're so high up," said Tilly, feeling slightly queasy. It was impossible not to feel a momentary sense of acrophobia. The theatre was the polar opposite of Discovery's low, modest ceilings and the scalloped back wall of the room created the illusory sensation of leaning over the stage below in a mild optical illusion.

"At least we're not on the front row," said Stamets, because merely standing at the front row of any section was enough to create the sensation of teetering at the edge of a cliff. Species prone to inner ear imbalances like humans were advised to avoid those seats entirely.

They took their seats, Stamets smart in his tuxedo and Tilly looking the picture of elegance in a long black dress and attached capelet. Her red curls were pulled back into a ponytail big enough to be a halo. Stamets listened to the whisper in the air and for a moment it felt like he might hear Culber if he listened closely enough. "Thank you for doing this with me."

"I'm honored you invited me," said Tilly, consulting her program.

The conductor arrived to brief fanfare. As the lights dimmed and the stage came to life, a triumph of horns and flutes played their spirited invitation to the world of Puccini's _La Bohème_ and were joined almost immediately by the voices of the performers.

The notes floated upwards through the air. The movements of the singers were balletic when viewed from above, carefully choreographed to suit the swirling aesthetics of classical Kasseelian culture, and Tilly was soon lost in the music even if she did not understand the exact words.

Stamets was lost in the music, too, but he could barely see the performers through the watery field of his eyes and soon closed them, imagining he was in another time and place with a different companion. He settled back against the plush velvety material of the seat and heard partly the music and partly the memory of Culber, his mind's eye picturing the doctor's smile and the brush of stubble across his jaw. The opera house was forgotten in favor of the soft blue lights of their shared quarters late at night. Moonlight settings they had called it, and the singing became a backdrop to a far more beautiful moment.

Stamets' eyes only opened when the version of Culber in his mind said, "Come on, we're missing the show."

At intermission, they refreshed themselves with a pair of drinks as Tilly fretted about the wisdom of drinking at all. Taking a bathroom break while the performance was ongoing seemed a terrible social faux pas.

"You're overthinking," Stamets told her.

"You know what? I am!" She downed her drink in one go. "Whew!"

Tilly turned, looking across the crowd to see what else people did during opera intermissions besides imbibe alcohol and saw something on the far side of the terrace that made her face light up with recognition. "Is that..."

Stamets turned in the direction she was looking. Even across such a large room, it was hard to mistake the form of a lului as anything else and impossible to deny the familiar shade of grey-blue epithelial tendrils beneath the gossamer strands of the lului's semitransparent shawl. She was stretched up to the height of a human with the support of a cocktail table. Beside her stood a humanoid in a full environmental suit leaning with one arm on the table and the other on his hip, an angled black cape hiding the slight offense of the environmental suit's vulgarity against the sea of well-dressed operagoers.

"I think it is! Lalana!"

"Don't—" But it was too late. Tilly was already waving her arms to get Lalana's attention and the lului, with her massive eyes that took in whole vistas at a glance, had seen them first. Stamets felt his heart drop.

Approaching the table, Tilly was startled to find she recognized the alien's style of environmental mask. She had seen one exactly like it once before. "Hello Sylvia and Paul!" said Lalana. There were three empty drink tumblers on the table, though how many had gone to Lalana and how many her companion was unclear. (The answer, of course, was that none of the alcohol had gone to Lalana.)

"Fancy meeting you here," was Tilly's cheerful reply. "Who's your friend?"

"This is Omen. May I introduce Paul Stamets and Sylvia Tilly. They were with me during my time on Discovery."

"Pleasure," said Omen, his voice a low metallic timbre that seemed to hint at a darkly wry tone.

Stamets considered the masked figure. The height and build checked out. "I think we've met once before," he ventured. "You were with Lalana when she came to visit my research station the first time. Before Discovery."

There was no audible reply, but the masked figure tilted his head to the side and Stamets could well imagine the dry and disapproving frown.

"Was that where you got the idea?" asked Tilly. Lalana's head twisted in a manner indicating confusion. Tilly gestured to her own head to supply some visual context to supplement her verbal deficiency. "The—Memory Alpha."

"Why, yes," said Lalana. "Omen's species was the source of the design." She began clicking her tongue in a private joke. Lorca figured it out after a moment and shook his head with annoyance at the lameness of essentially saying the design was a human one.

The coincidence was too much. Stamets shot Lorca a sidelong glare. "What brings you here?"

"I am very much a fan of live music, especially singing," Lalana answered. "Gabriel and I used to attend concerts when we would visit Risa."

"Lorca liked opera?" said Stamets, incredulous.

"You're telling me people enjoy this caterwauling?" shot back Lorca, absolutely confirming his identity to Stamets.

"People with good taste," Stamets retorted, though Culber's love of opera had not been something they shared while the doctor was alive. It was only now that Culber was dead and the sound of opera brought him back to life in Stamets' mind that the engineer found he could appreciate the genre fully. "I wouldn't think this would be of interest to... someone like you."

"Likewise," was the response from under the mask. Tilly reacted with momentary surprise at hearing the word, which she associated with O'Malley.

Lalana was untroubled by the tenseness between Lorca and Stamets and said, "I am enjoying it very much!"

"Me, too!" bubbled Tilly, launching into an excited discussion of the specifics with Lalana that lasted until the lights flashed to signal the end of intermission, another one of those Earth customs that had successfully migrated across the Federation as an easily understandable universal cue.

Lalana's presence Stamets could almost understand, but he seriously wondered what Lorca had been doing there. Thankfully, when he and Tilly returned the following year for what soon became an annual pilgrimage, Lorca and Lalana were both blissfully absent.

* * *

2259.

They had unleashed a monster into the galaxy. Philippa Georgiou, every bit the bloodthirsty, murderous, opportunistic tyrant she had always been, spent the first few months learning the ins and outs of the universe she had landed in, playing along with the charade requested of her by Starfleet, and when she was satisfied she had enough of an understanding of her circumstances and her enemies, she left a trail of corpses in her wake that sent a ripple of fear across the whole of the Federation.

For the first few weeks after the initial refugee camp massacre, no one suspected it was her. It was not until the massacre repeated in another system, on another planet, that the rumors began to swirl across subspace of a great Starfleet captain gone inevitably insane after a full year of Klingon prison.

Then the rumors shifted subtly, the fringes of the story changing as a new version emerged. Georgiou was not insane, they said, but rather, the sanest person in the universe. She had seen the truth of what was required in the wake of the Klingon conflict and hers was not a way of madness but of strength: a galactic necessity if they were to prevent the Klingons from reorganizing against them in the future.

The Federation, these rumors further claimed, was being taken advantage of by the Klingons and various non-member states. The aid being offered to others was not being returned with anything of value and non-citizen refugees were illegally flocking to Federation worlds, straining resources already depleted by the recent war and taking what rightfully belonged to the Federation's full, legal citizens.

Georgiou was like a virus, her actions and ideas a contaminant, but this time, her contamination had spread far beyond Cornwell, Sarek, and the other wartime leaders who had approved her hydro bomb proposal in the waning days of the war.

Some flocked to this bold legend, exactly as Georgiou knew they would, because they saw the recent Klingon conflict as a sign of things to come and they longed for the authoritarian strength of someone who would crack down on the Federation's enemies in every way possible.

Others retaliated to this evolution of the narrative by doubling down on the claims of insanity. There could be no other explanation for a mental break so total, so complete, and so bloodthirsty.

A further subset of the population saw this new version of Georgiou as proof of the dangers posed by humans and their viral genetic instability and wondered if perhaps the solution to the problem was something else entirely.

Then there were those who knew the truth of who and what Georgiou truly was.

"You must track her down," ordered Admiral Sherak. "You are the only crew who understands what we are dealing with."

"Yes, admiral," Saru agreed, but after three weeks they were no closer to stopping Georgiou and the death toll had risen to seventy-two. Saru and Burnham were forced to confront the fact their knowledge of this universe's original Philippa Georgiou was not translating into an understanding of the Terran emperor.

In the ready room, Burnham standing across the table from him and a fresh cup of salted tea between them, Saru decided it was time to consider a more drastic measure. "Perhaps it takes a Terran to track a Terran," he mused.

* * *

Petrellovitz's little behavioral experiment—approved by Sarek at the time of its proposal—had lasted only seven months on Discovery. In the end, it was not Petrellovitz's lack of morals and systematic disregard for experimental safeties that had doomed the venture, it was Michael Burnham's enduring tendency to regard herself as knowing better than everyone around her and correlating habit of inserting herself into every aspect of ship missions and operations under the auspices of this assertion.

Put another way, Petrellovitz could not get along with this universe's Michael Burnham, and Burnham equally did not get along with her. Petrellovitz was used to a version of Burnham that relied on her for science, not one that tried to tell her how to run her own projects. The two were constantly at odds with one another in a way that went far beyond the rivalry Burnham and Saru had been locked into back on the Shenzhou.

They might have continued in this battle of wills indefinitely but Burnham and Petrellovitz were both too clever for that and had come to the mutual conclusion they simply needed to be on different ships. That, thought Saru, was an exemplary conclusion to the experiment that reflected well on both of them. Petrellovitz had since transferred to the USS Lemaître, where she was now a chief science officer.

"I mean, I can help you, but you should ask Omen," Petrellovitz told them over the holocomm. "Keeping tabs on the emperor was never really my thing." Her thing had been the opposite, avoiding the emperor at all costs.

That was what Saru had been afraid of. It seemed there was no way around it in the end. "I assume you can still contact them?"

Petrellovitz hummed and bounced slightly. Being in this universe had revealed an irreverent edge to her personality that had never been able to fully manifest in the mirror universe. "I can. Mac likes to hear from his sister every now and again. In return, I'd like the full, unredacted mission report from your recent jaunt on Nirros V and detailed scans of the next five magnetars you encounter. I'll send my specifications."

"I agree to your terms." Nirros V was more a curiosity than anything else. The incident was not classified, but several personnel details had been purged to protect the privacy of those involved, piquing Petrellovitz's interest. Saru knew she would keep the salient details to herself. She might even reply to him with some insights into how the crystalline entity had caused the polarity instability in the transporter stream.

"What do you think this means for our old experiment?" Petrellovitz wondered aloud.

"It means all Terrans are different," said Burnham, "same as all humans." Petrellovitz smiled at Burnham and terminated the call.

"Send Petra a copy of our Nirros V report as soon as possible," ordered Saru, but Burnham could not leave until she had asked one more question.

"Who or what is Omen?"

"That information is highly sensitive. There is still a chance they will not respond to our request. If they do not, then there is no need for me to tell you."

Four hours later they had coordinates for a rendezvous and Saru was forced to reveal the truth. The look of horror on Burnham's face made clear she interpreted this as a betrayal. "I saw his body."

"What you saw was Einar Larsson. A gruesome ruse on Lalana's part, assisted by Mr. Groves."

Burnham shook her head, still reeling from the shock. "The Lorca I knew would never have been able to lie low this long." In her ideation of Lorca, he was a self-aggrandizing, egotistical manipulator who had thrust himself to the forefront of the Federation's war with the sole intent of using that mythos to schism and conquer the Federation once the Terran Empire was under his sway. At least, that was what she had to believe to justify the way she had watched Georgiou stab him through the chest. Sometimes she still saw his face in her dreams, his eyes twisted with pleading desperation as he reached towards her.

"Perhaps you did not know him as well as you thought," suggested Saru.

"How could they keep this from me?"

Saru sighed in almost human fashion. "I know it has always been a great difficulty for you to 'put yourself in another's shoes,' but I implore you, attempt to do so now. There was no benefit to telling you this. A decision was made by persons higher-ranking than either of us that Lorca's existence must be kept secret. It was my duty to abide by it."

"You know how he was— _is_ obsessed with me."

"I am your captain," said Saru, but warmly, in a tone that felt like a knowing smile, because theirs was now a long friendship centered around mutual respect. "Captains must be able to keep secrets. I have not held many, so I hope you will forgive me for the one. If I thought he posed any threat to you I would have told you regardless. If you do not wish to be present when he is, there is no need for you to see him."

"No," said Burnham, "I'm the first officer on this ship and I'm the reason Georgiou is here in the first place. This mission is more my responsibility than anyone's."

She was worried, though, what seeing him would do to them both.

* * *

They waited at the rendezvous point for hours. Even Saru began to doubt if anyone was coming. Then a small, V-shaped cruiser devoid of any identifying marks and with a disabled transponder dropped out of warp almost on top of them and requested to dock. Saru and Burnham waited at the airlock.

None of the three figures on the other side of the airlock were entirely familiar. There was a pale, yolky yellow lului with a splash of darker yellow on its chest and red on its hands, tail, and head. Beside it stood a humanoid in a black and grey environment suit and rebreather helmet with silver latches. A tall grey alien with long, raven-black hair and red eye slits dressed in a navy-blue gown brought up the rear of the group—a Misellian.

"Greetings, Captain Saru," said the lului. "I am Lolalen, and these are my companions Omen and Aeree."

"Changed my mind," remarked the helmeted alien beside the lului in a metallic voice, turning on his heel.

"Captain!" said Burnham. The helmeted figure paused mid-stride. There was a chance that word had not been for him, but Burnham could imagine he wanted it to be.

"Perhaps we should convene in the conference room to discuss the specifics," suggested Saru.

Once the doors were closed and the official record disabled, all pretext was dropped. Lalana shifted back to her usual blue-grey and Lorca hesitantly removed his helmet. There were streaks of silver peppered throughout his hair and the years had crinkled some new lines onto his face, but the eyes were the same.

He did not hold Burnham's gaze. Half a second after their eyes met he looked away, focusing instead on the polished sheen of the conference table, the objects on the side of the room farthest away from Burnham, and finally the stars outside the window as he went and stood there with his back to the assembly. When he spoke, he addressed and responded only to Saru and his crewmates, treating Burnham as if she were some sort of void in the room.

Burnham did not take her eyes off him. She could not understand his behavior.

"We don't need your help," Lorca declared. "We can get her on our own."

"Then why haven't you gone after her before now?" challenged Burnham. "I thought you hated the emperor."

Lorca's fingers twitched behind his back. Burnham could just make out the enduring frown of his reflection. "Why indeed," he sighed to no one in particular, as if her question had come drifting in through the window on some cosmic wind.

"Because there could not be any question as to who had killed her," said Lalana. "We will help you, but only if you leave us out of all reports, official and otherwise, and take all credit for stopping her."

Burnham was confused. "You don't want people to know it was you."

Truth be told, he had always been a self-aggrandizing, egotistical manipulator, and he still was, but he had been forced to temper this against the realities of living on the fringe.

"It would be counter to our role in the universe," said Lalana.

"I was addressing Lorca."

At last he spoke to her, but his eyes remained locked on the stars outside. "Then you're shit out of luck, Burnham, 'cause there is no Lorca. But if you want to put a line in there about the great and mighty Captain Omen, you be my guest."

"Omen," said Burnham. "As in a portent of fate. You haven't changed at all."

Lorca snorted so hard he got saliva in his nose. Burnham was entirely missing the trick to the name. He turned away from the window, keeping his back to Burnham, and addressed the Misellian sitting at the conference table. "Ree! You handle the specs." He grabbed his helmet from the table and stormed out.

"Let him go," Lalana advised Saru and Burnham. "He did not want to come."

Burnham looked at Lalana with pity for how little the lului knew about anything. "That may be what he wants all of us to believe, but that does _not_ make it true. The Gabriel Lorca I remember was obsessed with me."

"Oh, Michael Burnham, it was not that he was obsessed with you, it was that he loved someone who had your face. And when you have lost someone you love, it is such a comfort to still be able to see their face."

* * *

The problem, Lorca informed them all once he had calmed down, was that they were trying to track Georgiou down. "You don't track Georgiou, you draw her out to you."

They knew roughly what region of space she was in. From there, it was a simple matter to falsify a set of refugee transfer records, disguise the stealth cruiser as a transport, and fabricate a distress signal for a fake engine emergency.

"Can't be subtle about it. She doesn't go for subtle. Whatever you put in that message, you gotta clobber her over the head with it."

"If it's too obvious, she'll see through it," said Burnham.

"Trust me," said Lorca to Saru. He was still pointedly avoiding looking at Burnham.

While the real refugees hitched a ride on Discovery to somewhere more welcoming than this region of space, Burnham and three of Discovery's security officers boarded the cruiser.

"Welcome aboard the Hayliel," said Lalana.

The ship was dark both inside and out. Its interior felt like being in a hole deep underground rather than the infinite reaches of space and the passages that made up the ship's veins were so narrow Burnham and her entourage could only walk in a single file. It was claustrophobic, dimly lit, and eerily quiet. It felt very Terran.

They arrived in the cargo bay and encountered a fourth crewmember: a young human woman who smirked up at them as she expertly cleaned and reassembled a rifle weapon. "The great Michael Burnham," said the woman, identifying herself as "Simi the Starkiller."

The security officers were permitted to wander the ship freely because, as Lalana said, "Anywhere that you are not allowed, you will not be able to enter." It was an opportunity to familiarize themselves with the layout of the ship and prepare for the coming trap.

Lorca was on the bridge, sitting in the captain's chair and gnawing on his finger in agitation. Burnham took up a position just off to his right, almost but not quite in his eyeline, and kept watch on him from the corner of her eye. He remained clearly displeased by her presence even if he was refusing to actively acknowledge her.

He was not the only one to take issue with the mission. "I am under no obligation to help with missions I do not agree with," said Aeree from what appeared to be an operations station. "That's not the deal. Give me the shuttle. I can still make the rendezvous with Jochrat and complete our objective."

Most humans would not have recognized what Lorca and Aeree were discussing, but Burnham had grown up on Vulcan and knew a Romulan name when she heard one. Exactly what had Lorca and his friends been up to?

"I'm amending the deal," said Lorca. "You want Mac to find out what you did to that cat? No? Well then, you're staying here."

Aeree said in a tone so cloyingly sweet it felt like it was dripping sugary ichor, "You cannot hold that over my head forever, Omen."

"You don't eat a man's cat!" Was that anger or exasperation in Lorca's voice? Burnham could not decide which.

"Even I know that, and I once ate a man," clicked Lalana from the helm controls.

Aeree hissed softly. "Very well, but you are warned," she said nebulously. Burnham was reminded of Lorca's time commanding Discovery. Then, as now, he had created a highly contentious ship environment. She failed to realize that this was a game to them all, and that it had been a game back on Discovery, too, with the sole difference that all the participants on the Hayliel knew they were playing. In time, Lorca would do something that Aeree could hold over his head and the balance of power would be restored between them and perhaps even tip in the Misellian's favor.

They waited. And waited. Lorca's agitation grew to a boiling point and Burnham felt it necessary to point out that the reason the ploy had not worked was likely him. "Our message was too obvious," she announced. "She realized it was a trap."

Lorca jumped up from the captain's chair and stormed out of the room.

"Why did you do that," Aeree hissed at Burnham. "Do you think Omen does not see that possibility?"

"It needed to be said," said Burnham.

Aeree's reply was unequivocally firm. "If everyone in a room knows something, it does not need to be said. You only say things when you think people need to know them and do not already. Do you think we were born yesterday, little Earth child, or that there is any thought in your head that has not already filtered through ours? What are you in the face of a thousand years of experience?"

"Ree, that's enough." Lorca had turned around almost immediately after leaving the bridge and heard most of the exchange from the entryway. "Burnham, with me."

The cruiser was not very big and there were few places to go. Burnham put a hand to the phaser on her hip as she trailed Lorca. She couldn't tell Lorca's mood completely from his back, but his voice was grimly resigned. "Sorry 'bout that. Aeree's a little protective. I'd say she's harmless, but... Her bark is entirely less than her bite."

"If you try anything, I will defend myself," Burnham warned.

Lorca did not respond. Their destination turned out to be a tiny mess hall, surprisingly bright compared to the rest of the ship, with white walls and silver fixtures. A silver table with bench seating took up most of the space. Lorca hit a switch just inside the door and the lights dimmed halfway, shifting the room from glaring white to a more neutral warm cream color he found tolerable. He slid past the table and plucked two cups from a storage cupboard. "When my Michael got tense, it was usually because she was getting peckish."

Burnham watched Lorca's shoulders as he poured coffee into the cups and rummaged for something to serve with it, settling on some sweet rolls. "I'm not your Michael."

"Aeree's not wrong. When everyone knows something, sometimes it doesn't need to be said." He pushed one of the coffee cups towards her and sat down at the table.

At last they were sitting across from each other and it became clear the reason he had been avoiding her so thoroughly. He gazed at her with a mixture of melancholy, longing, and relief. A faint smile touched his lips.

This time, Burnham looked away. He sniffed in mildly derisive amusement at her discomfort. "So this is what it's come to. You hate me that much."

When their eyes met again, hers were steady and cold. "I barely think about you. You're nothing but a bad memory that I put behind me a long time ago."

He frowned in annoyance, a frown she remembered from seeing it many times on Discovery, and Burnham was glad; she knew hearing she never thought about him would hurt more than suggesting she possessed any emotion towards him at all. "After everything I did for you," he said, shaking his head. "Without me, you'd still be languishing in Federation prison. Your adopted dad'd be dead in the Yridia nebula, and you wouldn't be back in Starfleet serving as first officer on that ship. A ship I gave you. You ungrateful..." He grabbed his roll and bit off a large chunk, chewing on it angrily.

Burnham was shocked. "You expect me to _thank_ you?" she realized.

He washed the roll down with a swig of coffee and sniped at her, "That'd be a start."

"After everything you did." Burnham shook her head.

"Because of it," he countered.

"You lied. To me, to Starfleet, to everyone."

"What was I supposed to do? You think if I'd waltzed up and said, 'I'm not from this universe,' they'd've given me a ship? I'd have been poked and prodded like a goddamn specimen. I only did what I had to do to get a command."

"You were using us to get back to your universe."

"As if!" He rolled his eyes. It had been the plan, and then it wasn't the plan, and then it was again. The plan had therefore existed in a state of Schrodinger-like uncertainty, both true and untrue, until events had forced it to become a last-ditch desperate effort to retain control of his own destiny. That was all he had ever wanted, really. Control for himself to make up for a life where he'd had none. "I just wanted to keep my goddamn ship." He sighed. "Maybe win that war for you. The right way."

"By bringing the Terran Empire here to 'save' us just so you could turn around and crush us beneath your heel and become emperor of two universes."

"Now _that_ ," said Lorca, "sounds like something the other you would've come up with. Maybe I could've managed it. Imagine, the might of two universes united, the possibilities." That was one way things could have played out and he would have been entirely satisfied to make it so. There was no denying it was a solution he had considered. "But if I had..."

If he had gone through with that course of action, he would have lost her. The only thing he had left of Michael. In the end, he'd lost her anyway, but at least it was not because he had intentionally set them down a path towards that inevitability.

"Then what was your plan?"

"Well, now you'll never know, will you."

Had he been feeling more generous, he might have told her his secret. There had never been one plan, there had always been twenty. His brilliance was in coming up with plan after plan so that in the moment, he could make the most of whatever fate had presented him in a way that seemed intentioned. He made the plans and fate chose among them.

Burnham glared at him as she sipped her coffee. Despite his denials, she felt she knew the truth. He was a liar and had always been.

Another sigh. "I didn't bring you in here for this. When I first became this universe's Gabriel Lorca, someone gave me a gift. A story. Funnily enough, a story was the gift I gave my Michael. It's time I gave you one, too."

A lie, she thought to herself, but the story he told felt true.

"I've got a scar on my back. From an agonizer, handheld. Spot where it is, can't quite reach it myself. Which is exactly what the person who put it there intended. She liked to put scars in that spot so her victims would have to debase themselves by asking for help to get rid of 'em. I even did a few times. I hated that scar so much. Every time I got rid of it, she'd put it right back. The last time she put it on my back was just before I came here. Now, I coulda had someone in this universe remove it the minute I arrived because no one here knows what the scar is or what it means, but I didn't. You know why?"

Burnham waited, sensing he did not require her to ask the question.

"She had the same scar on her back. My Michael. I swore I'd keep it until I took down the person who gave it to us both. So thank you, Burnham. It looks like now I finally get that chance."

Knowing that Georgiou was in the habit of marking people on their backs like chattel was disturbing but Burnham held herself firm and said coldly, "That doesn't excuse what you did. Georgiou told me how you groomed the other me."

Lorca's stare was uncharacteristically surprised. "Did she? That's funny. You ever think Pippa might've been describing herself?"

Until this moment, Burnham never had, because she couldn't possibly imagine the original Captain Georgiou doing anything like that.

Then she remembered a moment before she, Georgiou, Tilly, and Tyler had beamed down to Qo'noS to deliver what turned out to be a hydro bomb. How Georgiou had lit up at the sight of Tilly, stroked her hair, called her "Killy" in a way that sounded like a personal pet name. A knot of revulsion formed in Burnham's stomach. "No. You tricked the other me."

"You don't give the other you enough credit. I couldn't make that girl do anything she didn't wanna do. You have that in common. And she... she always knew she had me wrapped around her little finger." Lorca smiled, his eyes faraway as he recalled his Michael. He had committed a cardinal sin where the other universe was concerned, just not the sin Burnham thought he had. Sins were defined a little differently for Terrans. "She was the one wanted to be emperor. I was just happy to help."

Burnham instantly saw the flaw in the logic he was offering. "She was the emperor's heir. She didn't need your help."

"You think she was Pippa's one and only? Georgiou was fickle and vindictive. Still is, thanks to you. Michael and I lasted longer than most. Didn't mean we were safe. So we took a gamble. Together." He closed his eyes. "I still see her sometimes. My Michael."

If only Burnham had stayed with him in the other universe and taken up the mantle of emperor. He wished he could have seen some version of Michael on that throne. His end goal had always been to remove Georgiou and replace her with someone who would not debase him, threaten his life constantly, and take away the things he loved. Someone who would allow him the autonomy to fly freely across the expanse of the stars. Michael had exceeded his expectation in every regard.

Aeree's voice came over the comms. "Omen, we detect them."

Lorca's eyes snapped open and he smirked confidently. "Time to put on a show."

* * *

At the show's conclusion, Georgiou was flat on her back in the middle of the Hayliel's cargo bay, pinned mostly beneath a cargo crate, with Lorca's boot on her wrist and a Romulan disruptor pistol aimed at her head. Burnham stared at this reversal of fortune with panic. "No!"

"King of the misfits," Georgiou said venomously, reviving an old nickname of Lorca's. In their universe, that was what he had been: leader of the aberrations who pursued things other than power. People like Matthew Kerrigan, Jackson Benford, and Emellia Petrellovitz. There were plenty around him who were there for power, but enough that weren't to earn them the revulsion.

"Emperor of nothing," he responded.

"Do it," Georgiou hissed.

Burnham walked slowly towards Lorca, her hands outstretched in a plea, her own phaser set to stun. "There's no reason for us to kill her."

"She had her chance," said Lorca. "You really wanna give her another one, Michael?"

"Yes." A chance to go to Federation prison, but a chance nonetheless.

"You didn't give me a chance."

Burnham stopped. There were always signs, of course. Pahvo, the Yridia nebula, Corvan, his attempts to rescue, protect, and help her. Moments that to Burnham were obfuscated by his darkness, his cruelty, his contempt for the people around him, and his apparent obsession with her.

She raised her phaser into the air in a sign of peace. "I'm giving it to you now."

He holstered his disruptor and stepped away. At last, long last, Burnham could see who he was.

* * *

At the end of it all, Burnham made an offer she did not expect to make. "I cannot offer you what you had with your Michael, but... If you wish to communicate..."

"No. You've been talking to Lalana." He turned towards her, years of sadness reflected in his eyes. "You know what the worst thing in the universe is? Watching the face of someone you love turn against you. I look at you and I see..." His voice began to break. "You standin' there, staring at me... I just wanted one more moment with her. One last moment. I gave you back the stars and you wouldn't even give me that!"

She could see that moment, too. A terrified face, staring at her with shocked betrayal, falling to the floor with a wound worse than the physical hole in his chest.

"I don't want to see you. I don't wanna be near you. I wish I'd never—" But he couldn't finish that sentence because it wasn't true. "I wish things had been different. But I want you to know, I forgive you."

Burnham stared at him, confused.

"For thinking the worst of me."

* * *

2260.

"We are not far from Risa," said Lalana. "We should visit Sollis and Caxus. They have been asking to see you." As with Stamets and Tilly and that seemingly calculated encounter on the Kasseelian moon, Lorca was abiding by the strict rules set out by Starfleet. He scrupulously avoided contacting anyone from his time on Discovery or the other Lorca's life.

Lalana had made no such agreement. When O'Malley mentioned where Tilly and Stamets were headed, Lalana brought Lorca to give him the chance to antagonize Stamets one last time as a small consolation gift. Also because, as much as Lorca loved pushing Stamets' buttons, he still liked Stamets in his own way.

The thought of visiting Risa made Lorca uncomfortable. Out of all the people who had known the other Lorca, he had not managed to trick any of them for very long, and by all accounts, Sollis and Caxus knew the other Lorca very, very well. He pointed this out.

"Do not worry," said Lalana. "It is you they wish to meet. I knew they could keep a secret and so I told them who you were."

"That wasn't your secret to tell," Lorca chided.

"Wasn't it?"

* * *

In the end, they could not go to Risa because it was too much a risk. Sollis and Caxus came to them, beaming aboard the Hayliel after very carefully confirming Lalana was standing far enough away that there was no danger of materializing where she was standing. Lorca shielded his eyes from the blinding white light of the transport. Since they were not headed down to the planet, he had seen no reason to spray his eyes that morning and now he was being rewarded with a wincing pain for his sulking laziness.

"Sollis and Caxus, it is so wonderful to have you on my ship at last. May I introduce Gabriel Lorca?"

Lorca lowered his hand and squinted at their guests, unsure what to make of them as his eyes adjusted.

He froze with his arm hovering in the air. It was _her_. Impossibly, unbelievably, and miraculously her, and because Risians lived much longer than humans, she looked much the same as she had back then. Those unmistakable emerald-green eyes, the cascade of wavy honey-brown hair, sun-kissed skin and a smile that made you want to drop everything and run to wherever she was.

These details had been entirely diminished in the version of her he had once known, but here they were presented in full radiance, and she was even more stunning.

"You're Sollis?" he asked.

Sollis smiled. "Like the word 'solace' in your language, meaning comfort."

Lorca had never known her name. In his universe, it was likely she had never had one. Many slaves were never given names or were taken from their parents at such young ages they never knew them. If he could have chosen a name for her, though, it would have been exactly that. Solace was what she had been, the other version of her, for that brief moment until Georgiou took her away and created a wound that lasted until he found new purpose in Michael. Now, here she was again, entirely restored. He could scarcely breathe at the sight of her.

Sollis could tell there was something more to this than a mere first meeting. She could see the pain and shock and sensed it was connected to her. There was a lopsidedly helpless yet hopeful smile on Lorca's face, a wish he could not speak, and a despair just beneath it.

She decided to do something about it. She approached, arms raised, and hugged him. "It's a pleasure to meet you," she said.

He wrapped his arms around her after a moment, returning the hug more tightly than he should have. Her hair smelled faintly of flowers and the sea. Destiny, he decided. It was destiny. "I've missed your face," he said softly in a whisper only she could hear.

She smiled and closed her eyes, because even if this was not her friend Gabriel Lorca, there was no denying she felt the same. "I missed yours."

Standing to the side, Lalana and Caxus watched this display of desperate familiarity without judgment. Caxus touched a finger to his lips in a pensive motion Lalana recognized all too well. "This Gabriel is a little more of a one partner person," she advised.

"That's disappointing," said Caxus mildly.

"Nn. He is a very good Gabriel Lorca, but he will never be our Hayliel, not entirely."

Caxus reached over and twined his fingers around Lalana's tail. "There was only one Hayliel Lorla."

Watching Lorca and Sollis with unblinking eyes, Lalana pressed her hands together thoughtfully. She was reminded for a moment of Mischkelovitz's sacrifice—a sacrifice intended to save some other version of Gabriel Lorca in what Mischkelovitz believed was the original timeline. If Mischkelovitz was right, then maybe there were two Gabriel Lorcas in the world she had gone to, and maybe one of them was Hayliel.

Except John Allan had gone back in time to the Triton and put Hayliel in Lalana's path. That probably meant in the original timeline, Lorca and Lalana had never met and shared the things they shared here. If so, there was only one Hayliel Lorla, and he was gone.

How happy she was to have ever known him. How much she wished to see him again. All she had left was his reflection from the other universe.


	102. Only Then Am I Free

As she stepped off the shuttle onto the surface of Luluan for the first time in twenty-five years, Lalana's filaments rippled at the sensation of the words on the wind. There were many worlds with scents on the air and other species who used pheromones as communication, but nowhere else with quite the same combination of informational smells as Luluan.

The call for the gathering was already thick in the air. She had timed their arrival perfectly. The comet that measured the years of the planet was a brilliant streak of blue-white across the sky. Lalana's companion emerged from the shuttle beside her and inhaled the heady scent of the air. It was, to him, an indescribable perfume totally devoid of any meaning. He could smell trees but nothing else he understood, even if on some level the pheromones registered.

"So this is Luluan."

His hair was silver now, his face covered with many more wrinkles, but he still had the same impossibly blue eyes and a face that shifted far too easily and drastically and always betrayed the things he felt to those around him. His long black duster coat swept the deck of the shuttle as he stepped down onto the dirt.

The planet was not what he expected. Having lived so long on stories of it, the surface was largely unremarkable save for the few giant trees in the distance. Most of the magic lay underground—a magic forbidden to him by the planet's very nature. At least he had the stories. That was more than anyone else did.

Something like a slip of brown paper danced upon the wind above them. It folded, dropped, and snapped open again quickly enough that it caught the air before it plummeted entirely. Then it drifted easily down the remaining distance, revealing an old and faded Shkef whose membranes were now stretched thin with age and did not fully retract.

"You," said Serot. "Gade... Gaydli?"

"Gabriel," offered Lorca, registering vaguely annoyed amusement at the fact the other Lorca had failed to make enough of an impression for Serot to remember his name. "It's Omen now. I changed it."

The parallel was not lost on Serot. "My name was changed as well, but you may still address me as Serot."

Not that Lorca ever had; Serot was another thing he knew only from a story.

"How have your years been on Luluan?" asked Lalana.

"Many skymice have been prey to me, and also lului. As a... diversion, not for hunting to kill."

"You were always our favorite of the killing hunters," offered Lalana. "And among the best. In all the many years of hunting, I would say there were only two better."

"Thank you. I have heard the same. Come, Umale is waiting."

They were near the entrance to the cave. The geothermic stability of the planet meant Lorca was witnessing a view almost entirely identical to what the other Lorca had seen, but with the added benefit of dim flashlight, they reached the springs much more quickly.

The bioluminescent bacteria were beautiful, a softly shining carpet of light. Four lului were lounging around the area. They looked at Lorca for a long moment, then conversed between themselves in voices too quiet for the translator to pick up. Lorca watched a green lului ripple its filaments before diving into the water. A purple and a cream-white lului followed in rapid succession. The last lului, striped red and white, remained where it was on the far side of the water, watching.

"I will come back as soon as I am able," promised Lalana, diving in.

Lorca knelt down and dipped his hand into the water. It felt comfortingly warm, like a womb. His joints were a constant annoyance these days and he eagerly shed his clothes. "Join me?" he asked Serot.

"Shkef do not swim," she said, remaining standing far from the water at the edge of the bacterial bloom. Even the humidity of the area was unpleasant to her. The sense of moisture on her membranes made her feel weighed down and heavy.

Eventually another lului arrived from somewhere in the deep, this one ombre shades of grey to black. It clustered near the red one and joined the observation. Lorca fixed the pair of lului with a dry frown that neither lului knew the meaning of.

Lorca was taken almost completely by surprise when a lului arrived from the cave entrance. This one was orange. "Captain Lorca," it said on approach, then stopped and straightened. "No. You're not Lorca. Your particles are... mixed. That explains it, then."

"Explains what?"

"The missive on the wind not to eat the darkness."

The space between the stars. Lorca's personal particle aberration. All the lului could see it, of course, Lalana was not special in that regard. After fifteen years in this universe, most of the atoms that made up Lorca's body were entirely typical in their signature, but his eyes gave him away. The inner lens cells were the same ones he had been born with.

"I am Linali," said the orange lului. "Who are you?"

"Omen."

"And the Captain Lorca?"

"Couldn't say," said Lorca. He doubted any story told on Luluan would ever escape to history, but after so many years, he had no wish to retell it or relive it or even remember it.

Eventually another lului emerged from the water. It seemed to be the same cream-white lului from earlier. "Umale requests you proceed to the merge in your... ship. I am to escort you."

Linali accompanied them to the shuttle but did not step aboard. "When you have seen one Great Merge, you have seen them all," he said, clicking his tongue. The cream-white lului also clicked its tongue; apparently this constituted some form of lului joke.

There was no amused tongue-clicking as the lului stepped onto the shuttle to direct them. Immediately its knuckles began to knock and its fur to writhe. This action did not cease for the entire duration of the brief trip and when the shuttle landed, the lului shot off like a rocket and balled up on the ground outside the door, writhing down into the dirt for comfort. Serot trailed after it and waited until it had recovered its wits.

They were at the base of one of the great trees. Viewed up close it was tremendously impressive. Some of the branches were big enough that he could have landed the shuttle on them had they not been occupied by thousands of lului perched in a patchwork of random colors and patterns.

Beside the giant tree lay a vast field of moss, a hundred and fifty meters across and at least twice that in length. There were more lului in the trees off at the edges of the moss clearing forming a mass of visual noise in the gaps between the tree branches.

Their lului guide stood and augmented its cream-white base with stripes of red across its head and shoulders, then said, "Please stay back. It may be dangerous." It directed them to remain near the shuttle with its tail.

Four green and white lului with nearly identical patterns of black dots and stripes strode out to four points across the mossy surface. "As we die, so we live," they said in unison. The phrase was repeated back in an absolute cacophony of noise from the surrounding lului. It was a trilling hum of lului syllables that shook Lorca to his bones and far surpassed the translator's ability to compensate for the sound. Lorca realized he had never heard Lalana speak lului without the translator and that this was how it sounded.

The lului atop the moss began to vibrate in a way that made the moss around them resonate in harmony. The vibration spread across the surface of the moss. Suddenly it was as if a disruptor had fired: the moss exploded into a mist of green-grey dust and the lului vanished from view.

An absolute waterfall of lului came plummeting down from the tree branches above. It was a river of color dense enough to create a dark, blurry shadow in the air, obscuring the sight of the sky and the trees beyond. As they fell, a flood of lului poured out across the ground from between the trees, rushing forward with abandon to the edge of what Lorca realized was a massive pit. He resisted the urge to peer over the edge; the plummeting lului were not all exact in their paths of descent. They fell without regard for their own survival, some impacting against the pit's edge, shattering their internal structures. Those who failed to complete their dives were pulled in by the lului streaming in from the sides.

The minutes ticked by. The river slowed to a stream, then a trickle. Once there was no risk of being struck by a falling lului, their escort took Serot's hand with its tail and drew her forward. Lorca moved with them to the edge. He saw a mass of melting colors in the pit, thousands of shades dissolving into a reddish-grey soup. There had to be ten thousand lului down there. He wondered if this scene was being played out at every other giant tree on the planet.

"May the winds guide you," said the lului to Serot.

"Thank you, Lelleli," said Serot, diving off the edge. She swooped down to the middle of the mass and landed on top of it like a sheet of falling paper. A moment later she was subsumed.

Lelleli began to walk off. "Hey!" Lorca shouted at it, throwing up his hands for explanation. The lului did not understand the gesture. "Now what?"

"You wait," said Lelleli. It began to climb the tree and was soon beyond Lorca's reach.

It was dismally peaceful and quiet. Lorca ate a meal of rations from the shuttle and waited, reading a new book Simi had recommended to pass the time. Several dozen lului were scattered around the edges of the pit, watching and waiting as he was. The dim red sun shifted noticeably in the sky as the hours wore by. Lorca was nearing the end of the book when the first of the lului began to emerge from the pit.

They came out small and grey, their eyes big green discs as their heads swiveled to take in the sight of a world at once both new and old. The lului at the edges of the pit approached the new ones and pressed their bodies close, wrapping epithelial tendrils together as they lallened. The new lului sometimes shifted colors in response. After a few moments, the new lului moved off away into the trees and the sentinels repeated the procedure with the next lului to emerge near them. It seemed to be some sort of welcoming or imprinting of information.

One of the new lului came straight towards Lorca. It had already chosen a color for itself: navy blue with a fleshy tone head and chest and a silver chevron shape over its left breast.

"I am Wallulen," it said.

"Are you now," said Lorca, putting his padd down and frowning at the creature.

"I was named for one of your species."

"Yep."

"Then you know him?"

Lorca considered the question. He had known a Walter Chen, a brutal and petty man who had been executed by Lorca's own hand over a bet gone awry with his universe's Levy. "No, but I hear he made a mean frittata."

"I will remember that," said Wallulen, not that he knew what a frittata was, or why someone would make one which was not nice.

"You do that," said Lorca, biting back laughter as he watched the new lului wander off to the tree line.

"That was not very kind," said a familiar voice to Lorca's left. Lalana had snuck up from behind the shuttle during the exchange.

"I could've said something a lot worse," pointed out Lorca. "How was the meeting?"

There was something subtly different about Lalana, the way she was carrying herself. "It was..." Normally, words spilled out of her like a fountain, but she seemed to be at a loss. "We should go."

Lorca put his padd down and gave her a look. "Seriously? We came all this way and you're not gonna tell me what for?"

Lalana's fur began to writhe. "It is a lului concern."

"Fine, keep your secret," huffed Lorca, deciding he would get the truth from her at a later date.

He tried several times to do just that in the many years that followed. Casually, intensely, with bribery, bargaining, enticements, tricks, and threats. "I'm leaving if you don't tell me," he said, which then became, "I'll come back if you tell me." Soon it was, "Look, I came back, you can trust me. Just tell me. I won't tell anyone else."

Then, finally: "You're never gonna tell me," he rasped at her when his breaths were old and tired and he felt like a piece of butcher paper carried aloft on the wind and knew his days were numbered as surely as they had ever been in the years he had spent alongside Georgiou.

She brushed her tail through the snowy white of his hair and said the same thing as always. "It is a lului concern."

"I don't want to die with secrets between us," he said, which was as sincere a request as it was one last attempt to pry the truth out of her.

"There have always been secrets between us," she said. "But equally, you know all the most important truths."

Though the rest of him had faded, his eyes were still the most brilliant shade of blue. She told him this. A smile tugged at his lips. "Show me the color." He mareled at how accurately her fur reflected the striations of the human iris. Then he closed his eyes. "Now tell me a story. Your favorite one."

There was only one story she had never told him in all their years together. It seemed right to finally share it with him now.

"In the year 1866, the whole maritime population of Europe and America was excited by an inexplicable phenomenon," she began. He sighed happily and listened as Pierre Aronnax, Conseil, Ned Land, and Captain Nemo came to life again, the way characters do every time their story is read anew.

This time, Lorca did not hear how the story ended.

It was better that way. With the end untold, the Nautilus would never encounter the calamity of the Maelstrom. It would instead drift forever through the vast and dreamlike seas under the command of its infamously mysterious captain: a never-ending adventure of wonders and exploration through an inky blackness filled with schools of tiny, shining fish. An ocean as infinite as a sky full of stars.


	103. Epilogue - God Only Knows

A/N: This is being posted almost back-to-back with Chapter 102. There is a concluding Author's Note on my tumblr, writesandramblings.

* * *

They took his things and brought him to a room with two chairs and one table. It was the sort of bland, nondescript place they took people ripped from time to interview them, devoid of any markers that would say where and when the room existed. He had brought people to such rooms before himself, but now that he was on the receiving end of this treatment as he waited for the operational director to arrive, John Allan was not sure what to think. (Was there an irony in the fact a time traveler might wait for anything while sitting in the heart of an organization that could pierce the currents of time as easily as an arrow slices through the air? Or was this simply the nature of the now?)

He slowly paced back and forth by the door rather than sit, trying to sort everything out in his head. He felt like he had been used and he was strangely glad for it. He had no love for Gabriel Lorca, but after spending all those years in the past, he considered many of the people he had met there to be his friends. Especially Emellia with her happy nonsense and Milosz with his funny little hums and bouncing excitement, the two of them in perfect sync together; they were like family to him. Family he would never see again except in historical recordings or holographic simulation. Macarius had been so kind, and Michael Burnham every bit as spectacular as her legend. He even missed Einar's deep, booming voice, enduring disdain for responsibility, and constant dry annoyance.

The door opened and he looked up to see who it was. He had to adjust his gaze downward; the figure who entered was half as tall as he expected.

Despite having come the long way, she looked very much the same. Her filaments seemed a little longer somehow and her eyes a slightly paler and yellower a shade of green. She was wearing a flowing, semi-transparent shawl garment with an insignia upon it: a rank insignia that far outstripped his own. Her voice was more confident, more sedate. "Congratulations on the success of your mission, Lieutenant Commander Allan. It is very nice to see you again. I apologize that you were not told the full specifics of your mission and its importance. But we could not have you know information which would jeopardize the mission at the time."

Allan sat down, partly because he had to. "You..."

"That is right. I am the one who chose you for this mission, a mission I knew only you could do, and a mission I knew you would succeed in, because I had already seen you do it. Come. Would you like some tea?" She summoned a tray and deftly poured him a cup with her tail.

He needed the tea, and badly. She clicked her tongue at the way his hands clung to the cup.

"Now that your mission is done, mine is as well. I wanted to personally thank you for everything you did before I leave. I have been running this organization for many years now, and in that time, few agents have succeeded in their tasks as well as you."

There was no hiding the shock. "Wait, you're the OD?" The Operational Director, a rumor in the hallways, a guiding hand that chose the missions and the operatives with a perspective longer than any other, with an identity kept secret to prevent temporal assassination.

She clicked her tongue again. "But of course. I founded the organization!"

"Then..."

"Yes, that is correct. I encountered you in the year 2256, and it was from that encounter that I confirmed time travel was possible. It took many centuries for the technology to develop, and piece by piece, I collected it all. It led to what you see here. The product of the minds of a thousand different worlds and generations, a tremendous power we must safeguard to preserve the flow of history.

"Though, you had a hand in the events of 2247 as well, didn't you? I could see your particle signature when I first met Captain Lorca. It is interesting to think that, prior to the interference you caused at Dr. Mischkelovitz's request, I had a completely different reason to found this organization, because I must have sent you in the original timeline, too. I think perhaps I did it for her the first time. In a way, Emellia outlives us all."

She did something with her tail. Something plinked out onto the table. A silver holodisc.

"This is yours to do with as you wish," she said.

Allan stared at the disc, realizing the truth. He was supposed to have done what he did, then. When they had led him to this empty room, he had half-expected it to be for the purposes of disciplining him for disrupting the timeline. Stripping him of his rank and throwing him in a prison from which no one could escape. He was relieved to find this was not the case. He picked up the holodisk and held it in his fingers. There was nothing left for him to do with it but keep it with him, a memento of a friend.

If Lalana noticed Allan's thought process play out on his face, she made no note of it. "But I am glad you are back now. I have been waiting more than eight hundred years for my task to be done. Perhaps 'waited' is not the best word. I have seen and done so many things over the centuries. I found Dr. Li's Section 31. I rescued lului from all across the quadrant who were kept prisoner and worse. I found the makers of Captain Lorca's sphere ship. I removed Umale's tether between the universes and stopped the temporal saboteurs who would have removed from history the whole of the Federation. I have met more species than you could even imagine and traveled farther than you can dream. And yet, in all the sights I have seen, there is but a single sight that has always been my favorite.

"That is why it is time for me to leave. It is up to you now, Mr. Allan, to safeguard the past, the present, and the future. I wish you much luck with this task."

Allan put the teacup back down on the table. "Wait, what? That's it? You're done?"

"Yes, that is correct. I have done what I set out to do, and I am now finally able to make the death of my own choosing. Please report to Director Isis for your next assignment. Thank you again, Mr. Allan. You'll never know what you've given me."

* * *

There was a bright light. Lorca's hand closed around something. It was another hand. Not a human hand, a blue one, with four fingers.

He gasped and looked up. What he saw amazed him as much as it terrified him. "What are you—"

Everything was frozen around them as if suspended in time. All the horror, all the rending, all the death. Plumes of fire and sparks of electricity hung in the air. The faces of his crew, contorted. It was a tapestry of silent destruction. There was Lieutenant Commander Levy, who would have made a great captain, mouth open and face determined. There, Morita being tended by her adoring wife, Yoon, who had risked everything so that they would be together and was now paying the ultimate price. Matthew Kerrigan, his arm shielding his face as the conduits behind his console exploded.

And here, standing right in front of him, was Lalana.

"Hayliel," she said, "it is so good to finally see you again!"

He embraced her. "How?" he choked out, drawing back so he could look into her giant green eyes. The very eyes he had named a star for.

"There is not enough time to tell you. Even if I had a thousand more years, there would not be."

He brushed his hands across her fur, a feeling he had missed so much for so many months. Tears sprang to his eyes. "Daisy, the baby—" That was why he had called her here, but now it was too late. He looked at Morita and Yoon, frozen together.

"I am sorry, Hayliel. I did not make it in time. I wish I could have done that for you. I wish I could have saved them the way you saved me."

His head shook back and forth. "But, you're here..." He could see there was a difference in her. He knew her well enough to realize she had aged. "Why are you here?"

"I have journeyed very far and very long in order to have the death of my own choosing. I have seen so many stars, Hayliel, and all of them thanks to you. The worlds, the people, the beauty, the wonderment! And in all that time, and in all those many years, there is one thing that I never found. And that is anyone that I love as much as you. Your face is my favorite thing in all the stars." She had had many years to work out exactly what to say to him. Centuries, in fact.

He inhaled shakily. He had not had those same centuries, but he knew what to say all the same because for him, the memory of her was still fresh in his mind. "Then go back. Get out of here, Lalana. I—" He swallowed. "I would rather a universe with you in it! So long as you're out there, I—" He gasped as the tears escaped down his face. That was why he had been so cruel to her, tried to push her away and out of this war entirely.

She brushed his tears away with her tail, cupping his cheek. "There is no me without you. There hasn't been since the moment we met." It could have meant that she would have died had it not been for their fateful first encounter, and it did, but it also meant so much more. "You will always be the man with stars in his eyes to me, Gabriel. You are my tears and my heartbeat. I do not want death to part us. I wish for it to be the last thing we do together. I love you, Hayliel Lorla. I love you more than anything else in existence. To me, there is no greater sight than you, and there is no one I would rather die alongside."

He smiled through the tears. "Lalana." The surrounding debris began to shudder and hiss and groan as the temporal stasis field weakened. He said the three words he had never been able to say before and wrapped his arms around her, never to let go again. Her tail encircled him and her filaments engaged with the surface of his skin. They were one as the world around them erupted, the stasis field collapsed, and the Buran exploded.

THE END


End file.
